I'm a character - Part 1

I’m reading another book. I milked Cold Tangerines for like five months because I pretty much love exactly that kind of book and can’t find many of them. The kind of non-fiction book where each chapter is basically an essay on a particular story in the author’s life where through connecting events and conversations they learned something new, and who they are was tweaked by what eventually came full circle. The chapters were like four pages long and that’s all I would allow myself to read and then put it down until I wanted to read the next time.

Then Jason gave me A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, by Donald Miller. Thank you, Jason. I didn’t discipline my reading quota this time and gorged myself on his scrumptious little chapters until I found myself on like page 170 and wanted to cry because it would end on page 250. My girls get a piece of candy from something I called the “treat train” every time they go potty with dry underwear (can you hear me chanting “chugga chugga chugga chugga TREAT TRAIN!!” from the bathroom floor?) And about once a day I feel deserving of my own version of having dry undies and devour a reesy cup. I would really like to eat the entire train because I actually probably deserve all of that plus like 500 mommy medals. But I eat one a day. It’s kind of like that. Now I am back to just taking in a daily treat of uno capitulo and putting it down until the next time.

So the gist of the book is that these movie guys approach Miller to make a movie about his life and as they are piecing it all together he basically has all of these realizations about what a story actually is and how his life lacks them. And I’m not done with the book, but along the way his life goes less from being stories in his head to stories happening in his life. So I found some takeaways that have me thinking. And more than just thinking, I hope, since that is kind of the whole point of his realizations anyway. My posts always end up being too long so I might post my thoughts over a couple of posts.

Here’s one of the first quotes I underlined and appreciated enough to re-type for you. “In nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He’s a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn’t change, the story hasn’t happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just a condensed version of life, then life itself may be designed to change us, so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.”

So, I am a character who has been written into life. And Miller says, and I agree, that evidence of being in a story (a good story I guess) is that my character is changing. Kelly is changing. I am evolving internally, from one kind of person to another. It’s helpful for me to think of the “not” version of that. I guess a character who goes through situations and incidents and happenings but stubbornly or perhaps fearfully or perhaps selfishly refuses to allow themselves to change. Maybe that looks like me fighting my own story. I am a wife and a mom and right now I don’t have a job, but actually I am so busy with purpose that it’s crazy overwhelming. And in the midst of what I am called to be doing, maybe I just complain about it or fight it or avoid it. If I do that, I will not evolve inside. I will not be changed by God. I will not really be living a story. I’ll be spitting on it. I really cannot change some of the big storylines of my life right now (you know, wife, mom, staying at home to raise my kiddos). Not that I want to! But what I mean is that sometimes huge parts of our stories are written and we cannot change them but we can let them change us. That’s the part we can resist or let happen. And then there are smaller storylines that I can step out into, like relationships and conversations and pursuits and smaller callings. So I want to see the written stories and the ones I have freedom to “write” in my life as things God means to use for God, to change me, make me different, to make me go from jerk to something redeemed, coward to one who can even help others “fear not”.


Part 2 thoughts to come and for those reading/following Sacred Marriage with me, my chapter 2 post is coming Friday and I intend to be more faithful with posting once a week.

Moms it's Monday #3

Most of the time it’s those chill stay-at-home days with the kids that are the most challenging. For certain, we have days that are much to busy with driving around and going here or there. But the stay at home days reveal what is really going on with me, the kids, and the relationships between all four of us. It’s on those days that I feel focused on just our family, just my parenting, and just being a mom. And when I am in a right spirited place it’s okay with me to be about that one thing. And when I am not, I am wishing for better plans, cursing the weather or scheduling our next week to look busier than a bride the week of her wedding.

In her chapter of Cold Tangerines called “ladybugs,” Shauna Niequist talks about being amazing at multi-tasking at her job prior to staying home with her son. But then talking about the difference when just spending time with her son, she says, “All of a sudden, what’s valuable is not the multitasking, but the single task – being with him, only him, and doing nothing else.”

Even those of us that aren’t great multi-taskers are also not great at just focusing on one thing when it comes down to it. We make lots of plans, our calendars are full, we’re on the phone, we’re checking such and such site or email multiple times a day, we’re fixing this, cleaning that, reading this, stopping by here or there. We’re all multi-tasking…or at least continually-tasking, even if it’s one thing at a time, it’s a long list of tasks. We pop in on relationships and we’re gone for another week. We stop by and we’re gone. We are so in and out of everything in our lives, from errands all the way to grieving with people. And I not saying everyone is wrong who isn’t doing just one single thing, the same thing, every day of their lives. But I guess I am suggesting that maybe sometimes God does ask that we do that, and we wriggle, and try to pry ourselves out, because that might make us feel stuck or trapped, which is probably the worst word an American in our generation would like to feel.

What Shauna is getting across in this chapter has been one of my TOP revelations of the past four years of my life. And it took a lot of wriggling to accept it and rejoice in it. This is the truth that I can do the one thing that God has asked me to do and that doing that one thing might just be how he intends to carry out a multitude of changes and blessings in my heart and life, if only I will press in. And if only I will believe him that that one thing I put my hands to daily is very valuable to him.

Today as I was getting my heart ready for my day, as my kids were upstairs with Jason, as they always are when he’s getting ready, I felt compelled again to 1 Peter. It says to “prepare your minds for action” and I was praying that God would ready in my heart and mind what I would need in order to carry out the right behaviors as a wife and mom that day. And a verse or two later it said, “so, be holy in all that you do.” And that resonates clearly with what we are talking about now, that no matter what I am putting my hands to, there is still a calling on it. One might read that verse and feel a religious expectation from it, as if God is always having a watchful, condemning eye on me. Or maybe what it means is that if I am doing something, anything, God is placing VALUE on that circumstance, conversation, or happening, as small as it may seem. And he is saying that it is important to him, valuable to him that I see this small life as an endless and infinitely important grounds for growing the capacity of my heart and changing others lives simultaneously, all for his glory.

The last sentence that caught my eye more than any other in the chapter was when Shauna was comparing focusing on doing the one thing of being a stay at home mom with Henry to being a writer because in both of those things what was important was not getting carried away but instead to be devoted to a single thing. She said, “Writing is about choosing the one narrow thing and following it as far as it will take me, instead of chasing all the snaps and crackles in my head.”

I. love. that.

The “as far as it will take me” line gives me precise wording to something I have been feeling the Lord say to me for a long time. It’s been like a vague, understood encouragement from him to be obedient, persistent, determined in the same direction because he was still working on me, still changing me, still using this one role in my life to make me new. And it’s like he’s been asking me to walk in this calling as far as He desires to take me. We have these moments in Christianity when we say things like, ‘Now I totally understand __’ or ‘I used to think __ but now God showed me __’ as if we now have the full mind of Christ about one particular thing. But God is so huge and we are so silly. If He does grace us with a revelation or clarity to understand how he sees things, it is such a minute fraction of the full picture that it boggles my mind that any of us claim to be done learning about something of Him. Motherhood has been a really specific, vivid example to me of this idea that I need to walk with the Lord through this very particular journey as far as it will take me, through many lessons, many revelations, many humbling circumstances, many trials and many victories. How far does the Lord want to take me in this to accomplish his purposes? I just need to keep going to find out.

The snaps and crackles remind me of those maddening thoughts that flood a woman’s mind like, ‘what are you doing with your life?’ and ‘this isn’t enough’ (as if a regular job is – ha ha!’, and ‘you could really do this calling plus something else so that you’re still using all of your talents.’ The snaps and crackles are endless and sometimes they even come in the simple form of trying to make too many playdates or checking our email and facebook so many times we haven’t even planned good time with our kids or getting our kids into too many activities and classes so as to avoid that bare living room experience that sometimes makes our brains feel like mush. Snaps and crackles is a great way of describing those random little thoughts or ideas or accusations or pursuits or lies or false dreams that pop in without warning and simply are just trying to get us to do something else.

My life right now is about choosing the one narrow thing God has ordained for me to do in nurturing and caretaking for three little ones. And I want to follow that calling as far as it will take me, instead of chasing all the snaps and crackles in my head. Yes. Wow.

Writing Clip #3

Shauna Niequest:

"Before I started collecting pennies, I used to throw them away, along with gum wrappers and used Kleenex. No one accepts them anymore, really...All of a sudden, the loss of these pennies seemed tragic to me. So I started collecting them, in a pale blue bowl that my cousin Georgia gave me for Christmas. I sort them out of the more substantial silver coins in my pocket and set them in their new place, the smooth blue bowl. I don’t know what I will do with them, but thee is something satisfying about watching their numbers grow, a little army of copper coins. It soothes me to think that if there is a place for them, then there is a place for everything. It seems immeasurably mature of me to do this, like having dish towels and stamps and spare light bulbs all in their respective places. It feels to me that if these worthless little coins have a place, then they have a meaning. And then if I have a place, then I have meaning.

In a world where less and less actually exists, where you can spend money without actually having any in your hand, and you can hat in a room without atually chatting or being in that room, these smooth copper pennies are rare, curious things. They are the real thing.

So now I’m amassing pennies like you wouldn’t believe. Maybe someday I will melt them all down and make a trophy. Maybe I will grout them into my bathroom tile. Maybe I will shellac them in tidy rows onto my kitchen cabinets or make jewelry with them. I don’t know yet. But when I walk by the blue bowl in the kitchen, I find myself absently running my fingers through the coins, sure for the moment that there are things that are real and understandable, and therefore good, things I can hold on to when my hands feel empty."

I just like that someone can make me fascinated about pennies. Cool clip.

Wednesday Writing Clip #2

From Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist. (I told you I read slow).

"For me, writing is about control. Or, more accurately, a loss of control. Maybe you are a writer, and you disagree because writing for you feels more like walking on the beach or getting a massage. Well, maybe you and I should never meet for coffee. Writing for me feels like getting naked in public. It feels like falling to the bottom of a well and finding lots of creepy crawly things down there with you. It feels like opening up a box of snakes. It feels kooky and scary and out of control. It makes me upset sometimes, because it makes me honest. When I sit down to write, for a while I read magazines and send emails and wander around, and then when I finally get up the guts to crack through the ice of my mind, I find myself in an odd universe of feelings I didn’t know I felt, and memories I didn’t know I carried. After I’ve been writing for a while, I get sort of sensitive and strange, like a theater kid in high school.

One of the true hazards in writing is that you yearn to write deeply honest things that rise up from lessons learned the hard way…and then you have to learn those lessons the hard way. I had written a chapter on jealousy, and after I looked at it for a while, it seemed sort of flat and cartoony. I prayed for a new way to write that chapter, an incisive and honest way to talk about being jealous. And not a week later, wouldn’t you know it, at dinner with some friends, I found out something about a mutual friend that annihilated me with jealousy. It was a thousand straws that broke a thousand camel’s backs, and I was tumbling around and around with these vicious, terrible jealous feelings, like I was in the spin cycle with a box of rocks. That’s the last time I pray for a good chapter on anything, except being gorgeous or winning the lottery or something. You pray for wonderful, honest gritty, tender stories to write, but then you have to live through them."

If you're not a writer, maybe posting writing on writing is like an annoying English class rerun but I am kind of obsessed with writing about writing ;). I think it's fascinating and I love this clip from Shauna. I took one writing class a few years ago and maybe the only thing I took away from it, besides never to write about lesbianism ever ever ever again, was that you have to write true things. You don't just write out of thin air. You look at life, especially your life if you are willing, and write what is stark, cold, , vivid, lovely, indecent, and explicitly TRUE. And like she said, sometimes wanting those chapters to come alive means that it must come out of your own actions and heart...and it can be wildly uncomfortable. But it's the best kind of writing.

Like it?

Blogging on blogging

I mostly don't have good ideas. It's true. Particularly when it comes to creativity, I kind of want to cry if I have to create something from scratch. I still remember my high school art teacher asking us to mostly do projects that were thought up by us and I would just sit there with a blank page...for class after class. It was awful. And then I would finally, with like eight teeth pulled out onto the table, create something SO not me that I wouldn't even want to look at by the time I finished it. It didn't grow me at all. Instead of giving me freedom, I just felt trapped. This is because I am mostly a type C personality. When I see a good idea I just want to wrap myself around it and be mentored by it and study it and learn all about it.

Some of you who really love me and don't want me to be self-depracating right now will say, "But Kelly! You are a creative writer!" (I can hear your voices and I appreciate your generosity). Well, let's analyze that. No, I like to write about TRUE things. Things I can observe in my head, things that have already happened, things I am learning, things that are happening to YOU. See? No creativity ;). It's already out there and I am merely putting it into typed words. Yes, how I say it does end up being "Kelly-esque" but ask me to write a fiction short story and I will freeze up and start sweating and be mad at you for expecting that nonsense from me. Believe me, I took that class. Didn't go well.

What am I saying here. Well, I am a bit off topic! What I was actually thinking about when I sat down was that everyone in the blogging world seems to have signature things that they write about and for a while here I think I am going to experiment with that. You know, writing about certain kinds of things on certain days and that sort of thing. That seems to be the trend and here I go "C" on myself and decide that maybe that would focus me to write about certain things.

By the way, this blog is kind of written to myself as like self talk through what I'd like to do, so if you're still reading, I'm happy to have you, but I apologize if it doesn't seem like I am really paying attention to you...

I kind of tried this before when I would title my posts "She Speaks" for things written mainly about being a woman and "Mama Speaks" about the obvious and on and on. Because I do like to write about Jesus, being a woman, being a mom, being a wife, etc. Usually my blogs center around these things, so I know I will keep writing about these as they come up.

I think the only thing about my blog, as I write about these things is that they always seem so SERIOUS to some people, maybe a lot of people. Like I know some people think I like Jesus too much. I do like Him a ton, but there's never too much of Jesus, and I only plan on liking Him more. And maybe others think my blog is too HEAVY. Some of you still reading are like Yeah, she needs to lighten up. Probably. But I probably won't. I kind of stay in the deep end of the pool down on the bottom with scuba gear. I don't surface very often and when I do I make faces at everyone like, What is this world all about? I'm going back down :). Some of my friends live down there too, so don't worry, I'm not completely alone.

But outside of scrunched eyebrow world, I'm totally skipping out on two things I'd like to write on a little more that maybe are a little easier to chew up and swallow and don't give everyone indigestion :). I really like WRITING in general and I was thinking that maybe once a week I'd post a little paragraph of some good writing. (Good idea?). I loved it today when I was sitting in the doctor's office reading Cold Tangerines and I kept laughing outloud at Shauna like she was entertaining me in the waiting room. I actually decided to make something from her book my first post on writing clips. There's one problem with posting writing. As Jason well knows, when I want to read, I take like ten minutes getting all cozy with a blanket tucked around my feet, pillows in perfect position, drink handy, pen in hand (because I even mark up for-fun books) and I read for one minute before I fall asleep. So that might be the main problem is that I might quote the same book for....six months. :)

The other one is just things LIGHT HEARTED. Just little stories (true ones of course) and tidbits and life observations that don't have to come full circle or fit into some kind of theological frame or point back to Jesus. Because I like to write like that usually. I mean light hearted like what kind of napkins are on my island or what I'm doing to get healthier, etc. (Good idea?).

So what do you think about me coming up for air in the shallow end of the pool sometimes? Does that work for Small Belle Speaks?