[grace?] #onthemove

this is about grace. i think.

This is about the realization that I am not who I thought I was, and yet everything I could ever imagine. Plagued by the flesh but alive with a savior.

this is about the fact that I'm not really living according to what I just said above on an internet blog page.

Boxed up. Boxed in.

We are a culture of sub-cultures. Born and suited towards tastes and differences and personality traits which automatically separate us from the group which wears dark-rimmed glasses and enjoys the higher fineries of life disguised as simplicities, or attaches us to them. I think this sub-culture is known as Hipsters. (I'm still trying to figure out exactly what a Hipster is.) And they can be cut further down the middle based on religion. Environmental pro-choice hipsters and 21^st century evangelical hipsters are instantly divided. Those quarters can further be cut into eighths based on tattoo convictions, the number of piercings considered healthy or sinful, and whether or not they will formula-feed their infants.

I've been called a lot of things, and I call myself a lot of things. I have been called a hipster, when I'm caught messing around with my nerd glasses or wallpapering my back bedroom wall with hundreds of oxygen-stained book pages. And I have called other people hipsters based on their Instagram pictures or the amount of coffee they consume in a day, as if he consumption of caffeine instantly pegs them into one subculture box or another.

(Caffeine has become a dear friend to me of late. Starbucks and office kitchen Keurig, let me hug you.)

We like boxes. Boxes are dark and warm. Boxes can only fit a few people and those few people don't come in unless invited – which must mean that we want them in there with us. Boxes are handy for hiding in because cardboard has the unmistakable ability to conceal the true colors, shapes and forms of what has been packed within. Boxes are nice. They make moving easy; they make it acceptable to carry awkward, harmful or shameful contents without the fear of discovery or rebuke.

And boxes are safe.

I found a box this week. I found it and I jumped right in and closed the lid, and I think I taped it shut with duck tape and shrapnel. The box was called “Golden Retriever/Beaver.” Also known as the Animal personality test results, taken in the intern office at work. As soon as I discovered I was a Golden Beaver I glared around at the Lion/Otters and Beaver/Otters and Golden/Lions in the room with me and slapped a badge on my chest written in blood and bought with my first-born son.

I AM a Golden Retriever/Beaver: "look on my works ye mighty and despair." Change me not, change me never! 

(I've been known to have this sort of response to personality tests before.)

And day marched into day of me taking test after test, writing up page upon pages of documents entitled “Myra,” filled with all the results and definitions of how my personality should act.

Me. I was defining myself based on some fill-in-the-blank-boxes on the internet, because, obviously, the internet is infallible and omniscient. Obviously. And everyone else taking the tests with me were becoming their name on a document heading as well. They were becoming test-results as I labeled the heck out of my co-workers, my family and my best friends.

I told you this was about grace.

Grace. It is this thing, according to all my personality results, I'm not very good at. Result after result listed my “weaknesses” in similar terms of critical (Beaver,) judgmental (Golden Retriever,) stubborn (Melancholy,) and struggles with close-mindedness (INFJ.) These are the awkward and shameful contents I put into my boxes and hide and carry around in my wounded heart. I'm all about being honest with ourselves and others, I'm all about justice, I'm all about standards.

But what about grace? 

I ask you: "How many times will you pick me up,
When I keep on letting you down?
And each time I will fall short of Your glory,
How far will forgiveness abound?"
And You answer: "My child, I love you.
And as long as you're seeking My face,
You'll walk in the power of My daily sufficient grace."

-Laura Story “Grace”

This is about the fact that I'm not left to my boxes because I've been redeemed by a God who takes those boxes and burns them in the fire of his perfect love. He takes my stained, cardboard, lock-down and gives His free and unmerited favor.

Let's redefine us. What's our true identity? Christian. Child of God. Loved. Redeemed. Chosen. Paid for.

Let's write those in blood, sweat and tears on the doorposts of our hearts and then let's sub-categorize ourselves and be the redeemed hipsters, beavers, INFJs, homeschoolers, mothers, bosses and interns of the world. (Or let's try.)

I'm going to jump from box to box, alternately fighting labels and loving them, because that's life. I'm going to tape things up and hide and I'm also going to embrace the person I was created to be and I'm going to do it all imperfectly. I'm going to believe God knows what he's doing with all the boxes I change like clothes which are stacked by my bed every morning I wake up and role-play.

When God called Jonah, Jonah ran away. Lazarus was dead. The Disciples fell asleep. Zacchaeus was greedy. Paul was ingrained in another religion. Jeremiah was depressed.

We are in good company.

Our boxes can't stop God.

The interns getting their job titles, not their identities (as I have to remind myself.)

Red Bus Project

#onthemovefororphans

[just a step] #onthemove

this is the story of how God brought me to The Red Bus Project. 

one step on a life-journey of millions.

The Red Bus the first day I saw it this spring.

I was asked for my heart.

Not parts of it, not corners I could live without. But my whole heart, with every faithless thought thriving. Imperfect, dank and doubting, it was requested. It was overcome. Stand up and walk: your faith has made you whole.

But on that March day as I walked blindly around the brick buildings which held so many well-adjusted, comfortable students, my discomfort pulsed. I felt corned as I stood between the iron mascot and the road, looking onto the quad of a campus I was loathe to step back onto.

Fear pulsed through my blood-stream like life. I was a Red Bus nobody; another girl working another nanny job in a sea of young women all saying they loved children. Fear had taken my car from one end of the campus straight to the other as I kept driving minutes before I found myself on the sidewalk. I had reasoned that I did not need to visit this cause – my life was comfortable. A thousand causes would arise in a thousand more comfortable ways than this one, and there was no need for my drop to fall into the bucket of Caring.

And I had kept driving. The fear of having to drop something in the bucket kept me going while fear of missing the chance made me call my mom and proclaim, as I validated my actions to myself, that there was no need to visit the Red Bus Project. But mothers are wise. They are the wisdom in our stubbornness because they know something sweeter waits for us on the other side. They give us what is best instead of what is easy.

“Go back.”

“Mom, there's no point. I'm coming home. You know, they'll come here again, I'm just not ready to go up there. I can't walk out there alone. I can't go to a campus I don't attend and barge my way into what's probably a sea of people. I hate crowds. I hate meeting new people. I'm coming home.”

“Go back.”

“No, Mom. No. I'm already on the main road.”

She broke my stubbornness the only way she knew how, her second daughter once again putting up a fight just so she could get out of something. The way she got out of everything uncomfortable growing up from dentist appointments to Sunday School. Her second daughter was bucking against God. And so with a voice I wouldn't have responded to at any other moment, my mother pushed me. She commanded me. She spoke life with fervor.

“If you don't go back, you're not welcome home for dinner. I love you, but you have to go back. You will regret it for the rest of your life and I won't let you do that.

Go. Back. Now.”

I went back. And there I stood, between the iron mascot and the road. A sea of details from the Red Bus Project website flooding through my mind, the fingers of my brain thumbing through the files of evenings spent pouring over a cause that loved children as much I did. I stood and breathed in the afternoon air, my coat in the car, my backpack hanging off my shoulders so I could disguise the fact that I didn't attend this school. All I wanted to be was a girl in the sea of a thousand girls, a nanny of many, just another voice saying once again that children were worth sacrificing our lives for. That we were the next generation of parents and that if we pushed away the children now, we were destroying a lifetime of tomorrows.

“Let the little Children come.” Christ said.

I didn't want to come. Tiny and afraid. The parts of me that wanted to join in and speak louder than the silence were being silenced by fear. Fear that I actually would stand out. Fear that I would have to talk with strangers. Fear that I'd be called upon to do something about the fierce love I harbored for children.

Fear that I would be arrested for not being a student at this campus. 
(A valid fear.)

I was afraid of being different. Yet I was too afraid to stay the same.

So I decided to take a step, knowing I couldn't go home proudly or face myself that night. If I didn't go, I would - once again - be giving up a dream. Knowing for another time in my life I would be backing out of ballet class the first day because my leotard didn't match the other girls'. Staying on the edge of the wedding dance floor, wishing I didn't care if I knew the YMCA or not. Watching the volleyball game, too intimidated to learn to serve. Closing the RBP intern application late at night, again, convinced I would never find my own housing in a city foreign to me.

Prayers flowed through my nauseous mind. They flowed through phone messages I hurriedly left for my best friend informing her I was about to walk across a quad. One, single, quiet, college quad. And for some reason it felt like a mountain of thorns and not a bed of soft grass.

Christ took the hand I jerked away all those times growing up, and he led me onto the blustery campus. He led me to the smiling face of an unknown worker, who I immediately confessed to – as if I were carrying a million dollars in my boots – that I didn't attend this school, I had come from somewhere else, and I needed to know it was alright. I needed to know I was allowed, accepted, admitted, alive.

He assured me it was alright.

Fear binds where Christ sets free. Fear takes captive where Christ breaks shackles. Fear stings. Faith hugs. Faith hugs unknown strangers. I was taken into the literal arms of a family of interns, directors, coordinators and volunteers. Orphan care was already in my bloodstream, and so entering where the Red Bus was set up was not walking into a group of strangers but into a circle of family. They did not present to me orphan care as a task to be completed this afternoon if I only wore a bracelet or band. If I only liked a Facebook page. Because it's a larger crisis, it's a longer crisis. It is more than dollars and cents.

It is hearts and hands and cries and laughs. It is smiles and giggles and sacrifice and labor.

It is a way of life, a way of Christ. It's relationships, and relationships are hard and they require decisions I had almost been too weak to make that afternoon. It's borne of a relational God who seeks our own hearts. For show me your faith without works, and I will show you my faith by my works. Show me your heart flowing out.

Show hope.

I was shown their faith by their works. I was shown and not only told. The Red Bus showed with their actions and words, with their hearts and their hands. They showed the sea of a million children. The sea of a million people in need of a Father. They left me with a heart bursting, each intern encouraging me to not let my fears destroy my faith. The housing would come. The daunting application could be filled out. The money would come. The fears would fade. I could be an intern. It was alright.

Be free, my soul. Be free from fear.

I could walk across a quad.

I could move to Tennessee.   

the fall interns ON the bus

The Fall interns today, in front of the Red Bus with the amazing owner of Hemphill Brothers Coach Company who takes care of our bus off-tour.
Each girl took a step outside of her comfort zone and trusted God. Just a step.

#redbusproject

On the move for orphans

[sometimes] #onthemove

Sometimes you want to dance waltzes. Waltzes that encircle all the gas stations you stopped at, all the new people you smiled at awkwardly as you ordered the pork chops with a local sauce you hoped wouldn't taste like smoke. You want to surround all the highway lanes which skimmed past, the white dotted lane boundaries folding together like the pages of a flip book, becoming one line. All the state signs, state boundaries. States - including Illinois.

(Dear People Who Live in Illinois,

I don't know how you do it. It is very flat. It is very, very flat. And the clouds made faces at me and pretended they were whales smoking. It made the road trip more interesting. But it was very flat.)

And you get the end of the road, and snuggle down in someone else's house on white feather-beds resting beneath zebra pillows. The brick neighborhood sits quietly manicured on the doorstep of the place you now call home for 14 weeks.

You want to sing “is this home, am I here for a day or forever?” but then you realize that song was sobbed out between chattering teeth of a prisoner named Belle. You are no prisoner! Not spiritually, not physically. You're here to fight for those imprisoned by injustice. And so, even though the first line seems to fit (because this is home – but home with smiles, not with tears,) you more have to belt out old Godspell standards and dance through the streets with the neighborhood dogs following your new boxer named Rocky, making friends with the trees and the polished street signs and the natives who wear a southern flair like jewelry as they wish you good mornings between sips of coffee.

This is Tennessee. This is where the adventure starts. Here in a city not so unlike my own, eating food exactly like the food I ate yesterday when I sat at my own wooden kitchen table. Except I do not know the wooden tables here. I haven't memorized the bubbles underneath the polyurethane or walked the cobblestones to and from work yet. I haven't met but one soul by name – but I will. I will meet a thousand souls in a thousand different places in life. Because they say life is what happens when you're not looking, and yet I desperately want to start looking.

We're here for the the voiceless, working above guitar shops in office suites so that orphans can be brought home. Running thrift stores as we run our mouths, being talkers because the talkers aren't heard. We're obnoxiously vocal and wordy sometimes because anyone who ever had something to say and couldn't say it needs to be heard through us. Interns for orphans, but going through life fighting the battles worth fighting for anyone in need of advocacy even as we struggle with the pointless battles in our own lives. Humans loving humans because we serve a relational God. 

Hello, my name is 2014 Fall Intern, and I like words. I recently used a lot of them and cried because I have never been an intern before, and sometimes when we go outside of our comfort zone so someone can have a comfort zone, it makes our words muddled. I also am not that upset about having to drive through Illinois for 5 hours, because it was actually very beautiful. And sometimes I make friends with Red Buses and Boxers and fellow interns I've never met. On Monday I may even hug them just because I finally get to meet them. 

These are the thoughts of an amateur intern, sitting on leather couches and in hipster-insipred coffee shops pretending that she frequently smells musty books and often wears gray Keds because gray is her favorite color. Gray is her favorite color. 

But red makes a statement. 

These are the first words of many words.

#redbusproject                 

On the Move for Orphans