Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

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Dear friend: How Much is Enough?

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Dear Lyndsey,

How much is enough?

How much money is enough?
How much charitable work is enough?

How much family time is enough?

How many working hours is enough?

How much relaxation is enough?

And on…

It’s broad, I know.

Dear friend,

The short answer is: probably less than you think.

That’s not a popular message in my corner of the world. I am surrounded by various cults of productivity, self-improvement, biohacking, and hustle. I encounter hundreds of advertisements every day, all designed to convince me I need more stuff. And magazines and mommy wars claim that an optimized life includes a sparkling home with a subway-tile backsplash, two children with good grades who play sports and instruments, regular promotions, six-pack abs, and a pretend-naughty-but-actually-perfectly-respectable amount of wine.

These days I constantly ask the question you’re asking, and it’s always because I’m pursuing a worthy goal: a balanced life. I think that if I planned out my days, resources, and priorities correctly, I’d be able to give and do as much as possible while also leaving enough space to simply enjoy my life. At the outset, it feels like an easy matter of calculation. You’ll have it all together if you make enough money to pay for healthcare and go out to eat twice a month; only say “yes” to the volunteer commitments that actually sound fun; and do some creative accounting to move “attend your nephew’s soccer game” from the onerous family commitment bin to recreation.

I think your question reveals that you know it doesn’t actually work that way. No matter how many commitments and adjustments you make, things never go the way you planned them and you always wish you could have (or give) just a little more. You’re still behind at work and eating cereal for dinner. Still finite.

The thing is, a balanced life—a life where you are able to have enough and give enough—isn’t a tangram puzzle of master schedules and productivity hacks. It’s a life that fully embraces finitude.

There was a time when an overzealous reading of books like Radical and Crazy Love made me think that God regularly calls everyone to perform superhuman feats of faith just because He can. Of course, I can never do enough to solve world hunger or fix my friend’s PTSD. Of course, I would say to you—but for a long time, I refused to really believe it. I fell into the same trap as a lot of nonprofit organizations: I saw how much needed to be done, and I thought that was some kind of summons to try to do it all. And in the process, I demanded more of myself than I ever would have expected of anyone else. That’s where pride came in: I thought I was special, strong, or spiritual enough to take on whatever work, overwelm, and abuse the world threw at me without needing a break. I listened to the productivity experts, the volunteer pleas, the charity commercials, the guilt sermons from resentful and jaded “servants,” and tried to best all of their demands. In the end, I became special in the sense that I was especially exhausted and unable to be of use to anyone.

There may be a time or two in most of our lives when our calling really is too big for us, and only God can get us through; but just because those can be times of great spiritual growth doesn’t mean we’re supposed to go around seeking out crises and crusades and grinding material poverty. And if God wants you to become Mother Teresa, God’s not going to hide it from you—God’s going to speak to you audibly like She did to her. For me, embracing finitude means I’ve had to learn to be content with just the little tiny piece that I can do. Far more than when I drag around too many burdens with a somber look on my face, I help the world when I do my small part with excellence, gladness, and faith that God will complete the work.

Here’s another way to put it: embracing a life of less teaches us to believe in true abundance. When we pare down our budgets, we find ourselves enjoying simple pleasures and creative pursuits—and delighting that much more in the indulgences we do have. When I stopped volunteering so much, I had more time to learn from other people and therefore improve the work I did—and I became overwhelmed with gratitude for all the good work others were doing in the world. When I obsess less about the number of hours I need for work and play, and instead focus on doing them both with wholeheartedness, I find I am better able to hear my body, spirit, or family say enough.

Enough is the amount that leaves some margin in your life: money for an impromptu dinner party or gift; time for a neighbor’s crisis or for just daydreaming. Margin is peace of mind. Margin is grace for yourself and others.

Enough is different for everyone. Just because Instagram Ingrid has a six-figure job and a Paleo meal on the table every night doesn’t mean you have to live up to her standards. God is wildly creative; God may have Instagram Ingrid right where she needs to be. But even if your enough turns out to be objectively less than hers doesn’t mean you are less than her.

In Luke 10, Jesus says that one thing is enough: to spend time with him and hear his voice. Everything else can be held loosely; nothing else adds to who we are. It is enough to be a child of God. It is enough to ask Spirit for help, and then do our best. It is enough not to take ourselves so seriously. It is enough to be content.

When in doubt, dear friend, don’t ask whether you should give, do, or have more; ask whether the thing you’re adding helps you be more present and more yourself with the work, the people, the time you’ve been given. Don’t be afraid to be small. Don’t be afraid to believe there is abundance beyond you.

Hoping that is enough,
Lyndsey

Is this a biblical worldview?

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On the eve of his retirement from public life, Eugene Peterson, beloved evangelical hero, dropped a bombshell: he said in an interview that he would perform the marriage of a gay couple if asked. Some wept and some rejoiced.

Then he published a retraction.

I was not completely shocked when Peterson took it back. The saddest part of the several-day saga, for me, was the language he used:

I affirm a biblical view of marriage: one man to one woman. I affirm a biblical view of everything.

For me, this stung even more than the confusion or betrayal of the retraction: that this normally-gracious pastor would use the phrase “a biblical view” to mean “The Biblical View: my view.” Even more because claiming to hold a “biblical view of everything” is pure hubris, and he should know it.

I shouldn’t still hurt when I’m branded as “unbiblical”—outside the fold—for disagreeing with the traditional position on this single issue; but I do. Years after I’ve reluctantly abandoned the label evangelical, I still miss my people. I hold out hope that they’ll slowly, quietly find more openness to their exiled sons and daughters, but they seem to care more about defending a single interpretation of a gilded book than about including us in the tradition that made us who we are.

What the gatekeepers of evangelicalism always seem to miss is that we wouldn’t care about being “left out” if we didn’t still love the same things they love. We are not clamoring to return to our old ways of thinking, but we’re also not trying to infiltrate and corrupt people with mind games. We’re just tired of being dismissed as caring more for ourselves than for the Bible, more for “culture” than for holiness.

I still read the Bible, and I still find inspiration, conviction, and direction there. Would you like to hear about a biblical worldview? Every day the Bible inspires me to prayer, love, and awe. It tells me that the universe was created by God, belongs to God, is called good by God: worldview, indeed. I’m humbled, reminded what an infinitesimal speck I am compared to the rest of space and time. How could someone with this knowledge fail to see God clapping with delight at the slow and steady discoveries of science (2 Samuel)? How could they condemn human flesh or fear those created to look different (Jeremiah)? How could they not don sackcloth and ashes in repentance for how we have ravaged this precious jewel of a planet (Leviticus)?

The Bible tells me how. Because humans laugh, like Sarah, to think that God could be at work without our help. We play God, like Adam, in choosing what to eat, what to wear, where to hide—so we have made a terrible mess of things. We follow our pride and tell ourselves it is what God would want, and then we find ourselves huddling, alone, trying ever harder to make things right but falling ever farther away from the center that holds all together.

No wonder, then, that at every turn we cling like Israel to strong men who promise to save us, kings who say they’ll protect but mean to use us for their own gain. No wonder we fail, like Israel, to care for the vulnerable among us, seeking as we do only to protect ourselves. We like the idea of beating swords to plowshares, but none of us is going to go first. The Bible tells me God longs for us to find peace, wholeness and well-being: shalom. But we trade it every day for a bowl of soup, false and petty promises of security, titillation, or well-appearing.

We do this when we hoard our resources, failing to give more than the minimum (Luke) and building fences to keep our neighbors out of our fields (Deuteronomy). Where God commands sharing, we practice divvying. Where God tells us there is abundance, we see scarcity. Where Jesus appears in the least of these, we hurry past to curry favor with Wizards of Oz.

We trade down, as the prophets tell us, when we use other people, benefitting from slave labor at one turn and browbeating friends into propping up our egos at another. We try to diagnose and meet our own needs from sunup to sundown, while God stands by, open hands, waiting to heal us.

We trade down when we forsake the image of God in others and make them into our sexual playthings. Yet, beyond that, when we get into the mechanics of it all, the biblical worldview has some shady ideas about sex. How many wives, exactly, should one have? And might it be more likely that the couple in Song of Solomon is not married than that they are? And if the family is the foundation of society, why didn’t Jesus get married? And why, exactly, were those spies in Canaan even speaking with Rahab the madam?

I don’t know. I still sometimes wish I did. By insisting that I consider God’s design for the world and my own sin, the Bible challenges me to do things I’d rather not do and hold opinions that seem anachronistic. It makes me an outsider to the world, in ways hopeful and painful. And I have to accept that it makes my life harder in these ways, even though it doesn’t always offer certainty. In the Bible, claiming to know God’s will and proclaiming it for my own purposes has been known as taking the Lord’s name in vain. So when there’s unclarity, I pray and wait. And I listen.

After all, the Bible is meant to point us to Jesus, right? Even when I feel there is unclarity, it is not my job to scour the book for certitudes or to force competing voices into harmony; nor does God need me to guard the boundaries of what the Bible is able to teach. It’s the Spirit’s job to speak through the mess. It is God who will translate story, epistle, poem, and law into song, wind, dance, and romance: the failed arguments of love.

what to say to someone in pain

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The dog park is better than TV. It’s where we veg out, our pupper digging in holes bigger than she is under five or six of those generous oaks that define Charleston. It’s our getaway when we’re too tired or stressed to do anything else. All the dogs smile and it makes all the humans smile back.

I sometimes wish we were one of those life-of-the-party couples, but instead we both give off a tell-me-all-your-problems signal, and this time, it happens at the dog park. We are blindsided by the woman telling us of her grief at the death of her boyfriend. I don’t think of people, three weeks after a death, going around and doing things, but here she is. You wonder how many people you’ve met who were three weeks out from a death. She says she is looking forward to going back to her grief group. She says grief wraps all around you where you can’t get out. Part of me just wants to go back to enjoying the evening breeze and not think about death. I imagine her, going around in an inescapable thick cloud that silently repulses all the people she meets, sidestepping her with well-wishes so as not to catch the grief. Then I imagine her at her group, huddled in a circle where everyone has a cloud and everyone’s cloud is touching and maybe by rights that should be horrifying, but actually it is where the clouds mingle that their colors are softer and they are not so suffocating. Only the clouded ones are not afraid of each other.

It is similar, I am finding, with chronic illness. People are curious, but they don’t know what they are asking. “I hope you get better,” they say, and they mean it, but they also mean, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” You don’t blame them; it’s not interesting or easy to talk about. But you also end up hiding part of your life, just to spare other people from witnessing your pain; and you really, really don’t expect them to want to. But you stay home more, because hurting people don’t belong at parties—not until they’re better.

Must I list all the other kinds of pain? We all know traumas; and we have all known the shame of having minimized another’s pain before we came to understand. People who have the courage to say they are in pain should be believed.

Here is another thing: you do not have to glorify suffering to acknowledge the truth that running away from it never really works. And it is not demonizing anyone to recognize, on a sort of flip side, that pain has made some people hard, bitter, even grotesque.

There is no good time or place to be in any kind of pain, but 21st-century America might be a particularly bad one. Once, towns were small, and everyone knew that everyone had illnesses, deaths in the family, financial losses. Now we call these things private. Now there are so many ways to go numb, it can take all your energy not to let the netflix binge or the scrolling glamours of other people’s lives take over, night after night, until you are never home with yourself, never doing your own work. It is too easy to avoid your communities, to manufacture escape in the dark.

But what is worse is the unspoken expectation that if you have done your work in whatever way, you will heal quickly and correctly. Around here we measure people by work done, progress achieved, goals accomplished, status unlocked; so when your trajectory is nonlinear or nonexistent, people tire of you. They blame you. You know they do, and you blame yourself. In the end so many of us are walking around in our clouds, trying to pull them tight around ourselves, letting them poison us if only they won’t touch anyone else. If only we can appear normal or strong or rational, if only most of ourselves can be allowed to live while some other vital part of us suffocates: the part that bears our pain.

Look, my friends, it doesn’t have to be this way! I think there have been times and places where people in pain knew it could make them wise and generous; where others knew how to value them without needing to know how to fix them. But in this time and place, do not look to any cultural institutions for these secrets; they are only within some of the bravest of the sufferers, themselves.

They are the ones who have made friends with their clouds, most days, and that’s why they’re not afraid of others’. They are the ones who have let someone else into their clouds, and that’s why they know the urgency of reaching out, even to the roiling, even to the ugly ones. Does that mean sharing the pain? Yes, in some way, it does—but that is how burdens are lightened. That, I would argue, is the whole work of Christ. It is the suffering who “know what to say” to each other:
Your suffering is allowed. You do not have to be more than you are. I do not have to understand. Blame does not matter and will not help. We can bear this.

We have succeeded when we continue, together, to be.

For We Are All One Body: on healthcare

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Is it my sixth? My seventh visit to this doctor in nine months? I wish they didn’t make you sit in a high chair to draw your blood, I think, rummaging through my purse for something, anything, to fidget with. I gulp cold water from a paper cup and smile at the other people in the room as if to calm them down. They are never as worried as I am; my body has a mild phobia of needles, my blood pressure sometimes dropping until jagged stars invade my vision and the world goes black. Today, my heart has already been racing and my head light for a while, since my doctor told me we have exhausted our options in pill form and she is prescribing a weekly injection. This is good, maybe this will be the one that helps, my brain says. My body is gearing up to reject these future weekly invaders.

“Would you mind loosening this band? I’ve passed out before,” I ask the phlebotomist, trying to sound nonchalant.

“It’s a tourniquet. It’s going to be tight,” she snips as she relieves the pressure choking my arm.

It’s about the rudest thing that’s happened to me since I left Boston, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Even when your doctor is kind and patient, she conveys through her busyness, her degrees on the wall, her brusque responses when you venture an idea, that you as a patient should sit down and shut up. When it comes to managing your health, you are viewed more as a liability (prone to eat too many cookies or forget your meds) than as a partner; your familiarity with your own body, ability to read and research, and willingness to make lifestyle changes do not count for much at all.

The bloodwork goes smoothly despite my insistence on retaining consciousness. “We will get to work on your prior authorization with the insurance,” the doctor tells me on the way out the door. The injections are so expensive she will have to make a special plea on my behalf.

Two weeks later, I get a phone call: the insurance company will pay for the drug, the pharmacy says. My copay will be $200 a week, but the drug company might bring it down if I call them. I thank the lady and hang up. It’s been my best two weeks, physically, in the last nine months; at the urging of several friends, I’ve been taking turmeric. It costs five cents a day.

Even when we pretend to be objective about healthcare, the word means different things to all of us. My own feelings about doctors. His memories of the time he nearly died. Her mother, in the best nursing home they can afford. His kids receiving the mental health treatment, disability help, or asthma meds that help them function in an inhospitable society. Her brother trying to get clean again.

The last time the country debated healthcare, I was 19, my chronic illness was in remission and I’d never paid for a doctor’s visit; so “healthcare” was a bit of an abstraction to me. But I remember many conversations about all aspects of the healthcare system: we were concerned with the reasons healthcare was so expensive.

This time around, I hear only about who’s going to pay. It almost sounds as if lawmakers believe, if they get the right actuaries and accountants into the same room, some way exists to balance costs and benefits so most everyone will end up happy. But most of us know that’s not really true. And it is the vulnerable, the cash-strapped and the caregivers, who are losing sleep waiting for the verdict: will their families be counted among the “deserving?”

This time around, as families find themselves feeling powerless, I have been reminded at every turn how the healthcare system itself disempowers people. How patients are run through systems like widgets on an assembly line. How your doctor, your insurance company, and countless bureaucrats in between decide whether you receive treatment. How one’s various doctors and specialists make it difficult to share records, information, and ideas between them.

I am disturbed that we don’t, properly speaking, participate in “healthcare”; we have a system for disease-care, organ-care, but not for helping people lead good and happy lives. It is hardly acknowledged amidst the sterile walls and medical machines that our organs are connected to one another,  let alone that the mental, emotional, and social spheres can impact our bodies as heavily as drugs.

I am frustrated that I have the option of trying dietary solutions to my own health problems only because I run in well-educated circles—that even though these options pose zero risk (unlike immune-suppressing injections), they do not merit mention by my doctor.

I am convinced we are not asking enough questions; for even if we found some way to pay for it all, our healthcare still would not be healthy, or holistic, or just.

There are philosophers who say that everything Americans do, we do to avoid thinking about death. Whether or not they are correct, most of us could agree that we are avoiding some hard conversations. For so long we have believed we could outsource the burden of considering these topics: the doctor manages our health, the Congress, our obligations to our neighbors, while the pastor answers moral questions and knows what to do when someone dies.

Some people in the gut-health and autoimmune-management communities (industries?) speak of a patient-led revolution: putting the parts of the body back together and empowering people to manage their health through their own decisions, relying less on drugs and more on lifestyle choices whose side effects are only good.

I hope that as we are re-examining healthcare, making our phone calls to Congress and our judgments of other political positions, we will notice that the experts are not the only ones who can make change in every aspect of our medical lives.

We can discuss end-of-life with our families to avoid unnecessary medical bills and mental anguish.
We can improve lonely seniors’ health outcomes by spending time with them.
We can pay more attention to how our diets make us feel.
We can share information with friends and neighbors and help people research their conditions.
We can redirect future tax savings to support programs that offer free medical or mental health care, make healthy eating and exercise more accessible, or treat drug addiction.
We can face questions like how to deal with pain and when to pull the plug in our churches and community centers.

We can thank science for its meticulous dissection of creation—while also recognizing that the mysteries of life lie beyond the reaches of repeatable experiments and double-blind trials. We can honor the gifts medicine brings—while calling out the ways the industry has concentrated money and power with a few.

We will help someone else to be healthier, because we know that our own health cannot be disentangled from theirs, any more than the trees of the forest could pull out their own roots’ from the others’, any more than the eye can say to the hand, I don’t need you. We, too, will be the ones who give care.

it was your forefathers who killed them

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It is Friday afternoon when it flashes across as I thoughtlessly check my Twitter feed: Black Lives Matter. Panic seizes me. What has happened this time? It is Philando Castile, his shooter has been acquitted, as if it was never Jeronimo Yanez who was on trial for firing seven times into an unarmed man’s chest, into a car where a baby sat. It was always Castile on trial, the judicial system only a conference in which everyone agreed in the end: it took 49 stops in 13 years, but we finally got him for driving while black.

I am unable to believe it. It was not even a murder charge. I am angry that I was so naive, that I believed police officers should not be allowed to shoot any person seven times. It is Friday afternoon. I go quiet and numb. It is a privilege to go numb, and I do it anyway.

It is Saturday morning, and it is the anniversary of the shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church. Maybe I should have gone to the Unity Walk today, but excuses and misgivings proliferated. Charleston seems to treat the shooting as a family tragedy, not as a public one. Not as a terrorist attack. This is hard for me, this politeness, this murmuring and the talk of hope; and the pretense that Dylann Roof was such a deranged outlier that white people can sufficiently distance themselves from him by expressing sorrow for the Emanuel Nine. But it’s not true. Fear of Black people put up walls around whites’ homes in 18th-century Charleston. Fear of Black people sent Roof into that church. Fear of Black people sent seven bullets into Philando Castile’s car. When white people let this verdict go by without acknowledging all this, we are allowing the system to call black people Others, subcitizens who do not actually bear rights to arms or to due process or to life. When white people pray for healing without working for justice, we are following the footsteps of the Pharisees. You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of wickedness. You give God a tenth, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them.

I was not here for the attack and so I do not go to the march, do not want to seem a meddler, and tell myself uncertainly it was good not to take myself so seriously. I do not get to be a fixer here, I tell myself for the thousandth time. I do not get to put the Walk on a checklist that proves I am trying hard enough. I pray, and pray, and pray. I pray I am becoming a good friend to my Black neighbors. I pray I will show up for justice, and not just for sorrow. That is all I know I can do. There is very much I do not know.

It is Saturday afternoon, and Bill Cosby receives a mistrial. I am watching who is upset about which trial. Few have said anything about either. Maybe they are also numb. Maybe they are exercising their privilege to ignore the news, like they exercise the privilege to drive around without fear, to move their arms in front of police officers. The privilege to broadcast their sexuality or visit people’s houses without the implication that they cede all rights to their bodies.

Social media on a Saturday is not the place to evaluate who cares about what. I know that. But it feels, everywhere, closing in on me lately, like justice is being mocked. Like might makes right is winning in politics and in the courts and in churches and the local school. And I don’t know who else feels that way, except a few who say so, on their pages or on the phone. They make me feel that I am not crazy.

It is Saturday evening. I am not numb anymore. I am searing; I am sick. Why does the man standing with a gun get the benefit of the doubt while the seated, unarmed one is scrutinized? Why does the comfort of some take precedence over the very lives of others? Why do we refuse to see these questions as connected?

Am I crazy? The people who say they are sick of hearing about “justice”—do they know the Gospel better than I, education-addled, do?

I am overwhelmed; I offer my crushing feelings and my swirling thoughts, my desire to act, to the Author of justice. They look small and silly. But others have made this same absurd gift.

Arise, Lord! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless.
Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself,
‘He won’t call me to account’?
But you, O God, do see trouble and grief;
You consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you;
You are the helper of the fatherless.
Break the arm of the wicked and evil man;
Call him to account for his wickedness that would not be found out.

The Lord is King for ever and ever;
The nations will perish from his land.
You hear, O Lord, the desire of the afflicted;
You encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
Defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
In order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more.

I light a candle and I begin by speaking up in this raw voice, with more faith than I feel: we are not crazy. We are not alone. We are looking for each other. Sunday is coming.

2 ways I manage to love my body (90% of the time)

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I first started exercising when I was 18, for a boy. He offered to teach me to box. We met up with a couple of other friends in his spider-y basement and took down imaginary attackers. Until then, my life had mainly consisted of books and music; the idea of enjoying exercise was foreign to me, the idea of playing (and failing at) sports, panic-inducing. But something about boxing worked for me, and that basement became the place where I first felt the joy of pushing your body to exhaustion and beyond.

Later in college, I was studying the doctrine of the incarnation when I began following yoga videos in my room. For centuries two sides of Christianity once battled: the Gnostics—who followed the philosophers in proclaiming that matter was evil—against the orthodox position, which said that Christianity must side with Judaism in declaring all creation good. I would read a passionate third-century defense of Jesus’s bodily realness and creation’s very-goodness; then I would go to the mat and exorcise the Gnostic voices in my own head. Breathing into all the space I could take up, I learned about myself and connected with the world in ways that books could simply not provide. Stretching and strengthening muscles, I experienced my body as more than a case for my brain or a passive, sexualized object. Even placing my hands on my own body was not something I’d normally done before, and by moving into these poses I sometimes felt I was encountering myself for the first time. I began resisting the impulse to live life floating above my body, or to (literally) minimize it. This is me, and I am good.

This was the first thing: to think less of “my body” and to conceive more of “my self,” a philosophical idea that has taken a lot of practical re-training to really absorb. To remind myself that my body and I aren’t separate, I made rules: I don’t berate, pinch, pull, deny, or constantly weigh my body. I don’t envision my future body or train toward a particular physique. I stretch out in public places when I want to. I listen to my body: I rest when I’m sick and eat french fries when I crave them and drink green tea because it makes me feel good.

The other thing is to get a little mad.

I think a lot of us realize that “society” has made us unhappy with ourselves, and we feel kind of sad about that. But as much as we may have pondered and discussed this in a vague sense, how often have we really comprehended the violence that has been done to us? The profit others have gained by encouraging this inferiority complex? The absurd entitlement instilled in men, trained to stare, evaluate, use, and discard? I don’t think we often put it starkly enough. We’ve been psychologically manipulated to reorient our lives around male desire through the physical manipulation of models and stars: forcing them into an unrealistic mold and then digitally slicing off parts of them anyway.

There’s something liberating about realizing you’re trapped. When you finally confront the fact that you will never, ever measure up. You will never look like Barbie or even like Gal Gadot. You will never be comfortable in that swimsuit, because no one has ever been comfortable in that swimsuit. You will never impress a guy who gets his ideas of women’s value from magazines and porn.

If you identify just a little bit with your body, be just a little bit fond of it, and pay attention to the messages you’re getting, it isn’t hard to cultivate a healthy and holy anger. Really think about how the senders want you to feel. The cat-caller on the street? Wants you to feel vulnerable, to remind you that he gets to determine your value. The perfume ad? Wants you to feel not-sexy-enough. The weight loss people? They want you to direct your time and energy toward getting a six pack—and not toward your own dream.

We can’t keep letting these people decide how we feel.

I used to think the “Christian response” to body shame was to pray that God would show me how beautiful I am. But over time, God showed me that my body is more than beautiful—more than how others perceive me. I do work, communicate, pray, cook, dance, serve communion, bike, hug, and love with my body. My body is getting older, and if I only love it when it seems to meet the standards of beauty others have given me, I will forever struggle against it. Now I don’t seek to “feel beautiful” as much as I seek to be free and to sprinkle freedom on others like fairy dust. I actively cultivate appreciation for my squishy bits and—this is really important—cut myself off from judging others’ appearances.

You don’t have to be an Angry Feminist raging around all the time. But once you start to care for yourself, you stop letting strangers poke at all your tender spots. You just get tired of feeling helpless about all this body stuff. You realize it’s a Christian Response to be mad when you’re assaulted by lies. You harness anger and turn it into spirit, because escaping from bondage is a hard thing and the liars and thieves do fight back. You don’t have to hate anybody; but you do have to practice self-defense.

I recommend we all stop being ladylike, and learn to box.

To the earnest ones

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You are allowed to be deep. You are allowed to care too much what people say to you and you are allowed to need a rest from absorbing the pain of people around you, pain they think is hidden. You do not have to be cavalier about things and you do not have to hide the things you care about most. You can be earnest in a sarcastic world; please, be earnest in a sarcastic world. The world needs overserious people and even, sometimes, wet blankets. There is no amount that you Should care, feel, or love. You do not have to wrestle yourself into nonchalance. No, you are not mistaken; there is an undercurrent of urgent beauty and great pain in everything, in everyone. You do not have to laugh often for your laughter to change the world.

You are allowed to be shallow. There is no one to tell you how many minutes per day must be spent in deep thought, and no one to tell you when you have gotten to the bottom of things. You are welcome to delight in sports, lipstick, cat memes, and cupcakes without guilt and without complication; you can sing songs without diagnosing your motives and enjoy movies without analyzing society. It is no one’s responsibility to know and understand everything. It is no one’s responsibility to tell you how much fun to have, and if anyone dismisses you for being joyful, childlike, absorbed with some little thing, tell them that the thing is a metaphor. Whether or not it is a metaphor, this thought will occupy them for sometime. Maybe they will come to see that we all deserve to be innocent at least some of the time. Maybe they will come to see that there is a particular grace in delighting in the world as it is.

You are allowed to be a stubborn overthinker and intransigently irreverent, all at the same time, in whatever proportions occur to you. There cannot be too much levity, nor can there be too much solemnity for this world. You do not have to be correct and you do not even have to be Healthy. What if we were all Healthy all of the time? That is the worn-out stuff of dystopian fiction. Do not let people use Healthy to enforce their personal orthodoxies. Do not be cajoled out of the gift of your own perspective. When we try too hard to meet such standards, we fall through some veil: where we had been listening and learning from others, we are flipped into the realm of self-consciousness and often, accidentally, self-obsession.

Here is the truth, anyway: the most honest, comfortable, bright delight shows out from those who have faced the depths. And levity does not preclude solemnity any more than loving someone keeps you from letting them go. Laughter is trust; it is allowing absurdity to have its say; it is surrendering your lungs and your voice to the unexpected. What a relief that there is the unexpected. What a relief to let people be sometimes, even though they are Unhealthy and Wrong. What a relief to let ourselves be, even to let ourselves care too much. How good to give up an obsession with others’ comfort and begin to believe who we are.

If you are too emo, they will call you adolescent. If you enjoy too much silliness, they will call you adolescent. Only to be obsessed with practicalities is considered adult; to forget that great questions, guiding values, joy in small things, the rush of encountering others once occupied your thoughts. Make the time for all of this. Indulge impractical questions about the meaning of things during meetings. And do something utterly outrageous every once in a while—even if it is only to have ice cream for dinner or lay without thinking in the sun, though the world is full of pain. These are all gifts we bring to the world, simply by our being, our encountering. These are how we carry our full selves into the things we do. These are the foolish, earnest love the world so deeply, deeply needs.

Inspired by David’s life and particularly his dance, 2 Samuel 6.

How to fail at social media

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Yesterday I had an idea, and I wrote a blog post. It took me many hours. When I finished it, I thought, this is weird and cheesy. But this morning, I gave it some edits and decided I needed to get on with my life. I took a calculated risk. I published it.

Two hours later, no one had liked it and A PERSON HAD UNFOLLOWED ME on Facebook. I am not exaggerating. A PERSON. HAD. UNFOLLOWED ME.

I continue to not-exaggerate when I tell you that I considered quitting everything. I could go back to dashing things off every few months when the spirit seizes me. I prayed a sad prayer about whether I should give up my professional-writing dreams and just be content brightening one person’s day, every once in a while, like I used to do.

And God was like, uh, no. Get a grip.

So I did some chores so I could think.

Had I ruined my blog by publishing a weird, cheesy post? Of course not. I’m damn proud of my blog. And someone, somewhere will like my little story. But it felt like I had failed in some really important way. Maybe I’m a little too used to people telling me how great my writing is. Maybe in a year of transition, of identity shift, I’ve staked a little too much on all those compliments. Maybe this is a tiny, tiny dose of that humility I, you know, prayed for earlier this week.

But even if I had actually failed, even if everyone stopped pity-following me, even if I never publish a book—wouldn’t that sort of be the definition of “calculated risk?” You might fail. Actually, if you practice a craft, you will fail. That is part of the whole thing. If you want to never fail, Being A Creative should be last on your list.

Here is another thing. I am an unfollower. It’s my phone and I only let a few things on it and I unfollow people every day. So if my thoughtless click caused this reaction in someone else? I would be super annoyed. DON’T PUT THAT ON ME, I would think. Your happiness, neurotic stranger, is 100% not my responsibility.

I’ve been thinking every day for the past few weeks about what it means to serve as a writer, as someone who has to try to make a living by trying to become a public speaker. What can I give? How can I help? But today it hit me that as long as I’m fixated on likes, hearts, and thumbs-ups, I’ll always be taking more than I give. I’ll always be operating out of fear. I’ll always be trying to reflect some audience back at itself instead of offering something unique—and maybe even giving someone else permission to be weird and cheesy.

It’s a weird way to relate to ourselves: by broadcasting things. It used to scare me to death; our devices and apps weren’t designed to make us better people. But I’m finally seeing hope. We don’t have to do what the devices and apps tell us: check them constantly, obsess over our stats, build our lives around our feeds. We just have to be good people, which has honestly never been easy. Or safe. Or un-cheesy.

But it’s worth it.

Likes and ♥♥♥,

Lyndsey