Lost Things

There’s nothing like crisis to motivate you to tell your story. When you’re in personal crisis, (if you’ve never been check your pulse), sooner or later you want to tell your story. Maybe you journal, see a therapist, get on the phone to a friend, or go to a support group.

Crisis drives us to take stock and remember who we are, where we’ve been, and where we hope to go. We tell our story to make sense of it all and see where to go from here.

~ Peter Enns from “The Bible Tells Me So”

Photo by Mauricio Borja: https://www.pexels.com/photo/inside-of-a-cenote-in-mexico-12259620/

If you were to walk into a coffee shop and see me from across the room, I probably don’t look like a person in crisis. You might think I need a little fashion assistance (hey, it’s Saturday and that means sweatpants!) but otherwise, a glance my way wouldn’t alarm you. Besides, you’re here for coffee. Everyone has their agenda.

If I sat across from me, I probably wouldn’t see a person in crisis. I’d see someone introverting, surrounded by books, laptop open, feeling their feelings and probably enjoying themselves immensely. Nope, just someone living their life. Good for you - er, me!

What does a person in crisis look like? Wild? Screaming? Raging in hysteria? When I think of crisis, I think of rushing to the ER, a doctor’s diagnosis, a confession from a spouse or a police visit to a home. Flashing lights and terror.

Not coffee shops, or sweatpants, laptops open and deep calm breathing. I don’t fit my own narrative, but here we are. Let’s learn the landscape.

Most Saturday’s I wake up in pain. Most of the time, it’s not physical. But, as long as I can remember, I have felt heavy in my body, and on the weekend I feel it the most. No work to distract me, kids are doing their thing, nothing planned on the calendar (how I love my calendar). It’s just me. I wake up to me. And, mostly I feel heavy, alone, and sad.

What’s the sadness about? God, I want to know. I make space for it. I ask myself questions, I’m kind to myself, I listen.

The answers don’t come. I feel overwhelmed and if I stay there for too long, I find it harder and harder to move.

Movement, in the end, every Saturday, is my salvation. I get coffee, I make myself a big breakfast. These are two reminders I give my body, “We’re okay. We have food now, remember? We have what we need. And, it’s good food, too!” I dress how I want. A third reminder, “No, no one cares how you dress and it doesn’t affect your worth.” I sit down with my journal and think, okay, what do I need to do today? What do I want to do? A fourth reminder, “Yes, we’re in charge of how we spend our time now. It’s okay. We get to decide.” Remind, remind, remind, remind, and slowly, the overwhelm grows smaller. Life seems possible. Autonomy is a thing! Oh my gosh, aren’t these eggs good? Delight starts to enter the picture. Okay, things are okay again. I can do this.

If I were to name my crisis, it is a crisis of unlearning. Growing up, I learned that my emotions were useless. My love of clothes and my desire for specific types of clothing was vanity. My handwriting was terrible and that it would affect what people would think about me (I’m really laughing at this now as I type this from a computer). My posture was terrible too and again, people are going to think bad about me. I learned I wasn’t smart. I learned that whatever personality I had, I was stuck with it (INFP here, if you’re interested).

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.

- Albert Einstein

And, then, there were things just lost on me. No one talked to me about what my future could be like, what skills I had (or could learn). And, this, this black hole of things that … that could have been, this feels large. Maybe a better way to look at it is a lack of investment.

If you see value in something, you invest in it. You invest time, money, effort, thoughts, and care in it. You look for ways to connect what you value with the world around you.

What were my options growing up? Option 1: Being a wife. In particular, a preacher’s wife. Yeah, that was the gold standard. I knew that’s what I was going to be. And, woooooooooooow, was I going to be a good one. I didn’t play piano though so that was a strike against me. Option 2: I don’t know. Yeah, I’m trying to think. But, my mind keeps coming up blank. No one talked to me about other options and the few times I would speak out loud of something different, I was given a reason for how terrible that career of choice would be. So…. option 1 it is! I guess.

Except, it didn’t work out.

Thank goodness.

What saved me?

First, I have a really good sense of direction. I attribute it to the southern Illinois roads I drove as a teenager. I would get lost on purpose, just to try to find my way home. And, I always found my way home. And, I think, on those dirt roads and being able to sit with my inner compass, I learned how to drive and pray. For the first time in my life, I started saying no things, things like college opportunities that didn’t feel right. I started feeling a pull towards things, like getting outside of the state and where I could work. I started to see possibilities where they didn’t exist or how they could be accomplished.

Second, I have never fit in. My mouth has always gotten me into trouble, mostly because I would say something outright truthful or outlandish. My clothes were never right. My thoughts never fit. As a teenager I spoke up in church on a Sunday evening when the sermon sounded off to me. I noticed how I felt during worship services and how fake they felt and was honest about it. I was SO SAD when worship music took over the Christian music industry because it seemed like all creativity went out the window. I never understood why being gay meant you were an outcast in God’s eyes. I refused to believe that shutting people out of the church would somehow encourage them to find God. That’s not how love works. That’s not what God does.

So, I bumped my way through life. I married, had kids, lived life, but still for many, many years, I felt so lost.

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What’s the first thing you remember losing?

Close your eyes. Think for a moment. When was the first time you felt the sense of loss, a touch of grief that whatever you were separated from could never be found?

For me, it was a doll. I don’t remember how she looked (though if I can find a picture I will post it here!) but I remember that she was a stuffed doll and she was huge! Maybe I was four? And, she was almost my size! I loved her. She felt a part of me. And, at some point, maybe through the many moves, or at a play date, or at a church event, she wasn’t there anymore. She was just gone, and as a 40 something person, I still feel that loss.

I’ve lost lots of things for different reasons. Sometimes carelessness, sometimes intentionally. I once threw away a diary because I didn’t want to remember those years. I wish I had it now. I’ve lost relationships due to life changes, and for reasons out of my control. At times I’ve lost opportunities because I didn’t recognize them for what they were. Sometimes, I lost my way simply because I didn’t understand where I was or what I should be doing.

When I was a kid, sometimes my dad would take us caving. Illinois has a lot of caves. Sometimes, they were straight up holes in the ground and the only thing connecting you back to the outside world were strings tied to the entrance leading you inside. You always held on, because those strings were your way in AND your way out. Someone had gone in front of you, had explored the cave, had gone much farther than you intended to go, and they made sure that there would be something there for you to find your way back.

This is God to me. They are the one who went down and did what I did not have the strength to do, walked much farther in then I would have wanted, and made sure I had a way out. My strings were my internally compass and my weirdness. They led me to marry a person who would support me for life. They led me to find a career in tech, where all the weird people sit. They lead me to the strangest places where sometimes I find the things that I thought I lost: Opportunities, songs, clothes, and even my past.

Sometimes, very rarely, when I sleep, I dream about finding a door in my house I’ve never seen before. When I open the door, I find I have access to everything I need. Anything and everything - furniture, toys, bedrooms, crafts. It’s just abundance. Everywhere. And, every time I wake up from a “house dream”, I feel whole. I feel complete. I feel found. I feel okay.

If God is the God of anything, I believe that God is the God of lost things. We’ve lost so much. It’s unbearable at times. And, yet, time and time again, I’ve seen God recover something for me that I thought would be lost forever. Mary Poppins had it right when she said there is a place where the Lost Things Go:

Sometimes getting lost is the perfect way to get found. I hold onto my strings and I am finding my way out of the dark. I learned that I think deeply about the systems around me (be it church, American culture, or software). I learned that nobody cares about me, my clothes, my cursive, or my posture. Why stress? I learned that my emotions are signals carrying messages my body is sending and that I better pay attention and try to read what it’s saying! I learned that personality is a myth (Thank God!) and that living by my values can provide clearer ways of how to live and grow. I learned that many of the spiritual “rules” laid out for me as a kid are just someone’s idea and not what God intended in the first place.

So, yeah. Should you bump into me in a coffee shop, or anyone really, consider what looks like calm may be crisis. Be kind always, because you can’t tell the difference. But, being in crisis doesn’t not mean lost forever.

Just merely out of place.