My Materialistic Christmas

I have a confession to make: this Christmas season, I have been that heinous materialist everyone rails against. It crept in so subtly for me, cloaked as caring, that I didn't notice it until I'd had several meltdowns over gifts. I'm not good at giving gifts. It's not that I'm awful at it; I like to think the presents I give usually fall somewhere within the realm of what is desired by the recipient. But I know people who seem to have a natural, beautiful, warm-hearted grace in the way they choose things out and give them to others, free from self-centered anxiety, beaming with joy. Unfortunately, I am not that way. I overthink every selection to death, cry over the fact that our already strained budget can't afford more than what feels like shabby knickknacks, and think through all the potential ways the person in question will hate me once they receive my utter failure of a present. I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not. One night a couple weeks ago I was lying in bed staring into the darkness, fighting back tears, and Jordan asked what was wrong. I gave an answer to the effect of "everything I've bought for people is crap and meaningless and won't impact or affect them at all, and in a year they won't even remember it and no one will know that I love them." Of course it was absurd, and he gently told me so. But it was a while after that conversation that I had the realization with which I opened this post: I am a materialist.

I had fallen into the classic trap of making Christmas about "stuff." In a much more subtle way than many others, perhaps, but in a way equally deadly. I was acting as though my merit as a human being, my place in my family's lives, the acceptability of my efforts at caring, all hinged on what I had bought. I was wrapping up my perception of worthiness in fragile colored paper and ribbon. For those of us who follow the church calendar, today is the third Sunday of Advent, the time of anticipation leading up to celebrating the arrival of our incarnate Christ. A friend challenged me at the beginning to be intentional about how I engage this season, to find something specific to do every day to observe it. One of the things that has resulted is a thought that's been eating away at my uptight materialistic mind games.

I grew up in church hearing this concept that we give gifts at Christmas to remember the fact that Jesus was given to us as the greatest gift. As simplistic as it sounds, I think there's truth in the statement-- although perhaps it's been left alone too soon. I feel like Christ-followers often take it at face value, thinking of the act alone: OK, we are supposed to give things. And then we dismiss it and move on. This year I have begun to feel the weighty importance of not just leaving it at the act of giving itself, but rather to look at what kind of gift it was. The Jewish hope for the arrival of their Messiah was that He would bring material prosperity and circumstantial political power. They wanted Him to bring tangible, visible gifts-- that was how they thought He had to love them. But His love was stranger, wilder, harder than that. He didn't show up bringing an army or economic revolution. He brought Himself. In a dark world teeming with unrest and racial hatred and political instability and a lack of medical technology, He presented Himself as the most vulnerable, unimpressive package imaginable: an infant, confined by cloth, helpless in a feeding trough. Not everyone would understand what He was doing, and He knew it (though at moments later in His life we get glimpses of His deep yearning for it to be otherwise). But He came anyway, with nothing but Himself. That kind of love might not have made the surface level, circumstantial shifts that an oppressed people group hoped for. But it seared the surface of the whole of human history with the peculiar radiance of hope. It marked every dark corner of earthly experience with the achingly brilliant words God is with us. The life offered in complete empty-handed vulnerability became the life that would (from a spiritual and arguably historical perspective as well) have the single most impact of any life in human history. And of course, this is the kind of gift I believe He still gives. My encounters with Him lead me to believe that although we may beg Him for circumstantial reprieves and material successes and even intellectual surety, He doesn't come to us like that. He just comes as Himself. And the promise He gives me, the only one that has ever satisfied me, was never about making these days on the earth's broken skin smoother and softer and shinier. The promise is still God is with you. The promise is still you are not alone. If I am to emulate the Christ this Christmas, to echo this Jewish rabbi who rocked history with His counter-cultural vulnerability, then when I go see my family or engage with my friends I don't need to bring presents. I will, but they're more side effects of an event rather than the event itself (just as there may be moments of circumstantial comfort as a result of Christ's coming into our lives, but that is certainly not the point or even the norm). I just need to bring myself. Vulnerable, messed up, a little too loud about coffee and rock and roll, a little too quiet about everything else, self-absorbed, incomplete, but completely dead-on in love with every single person I see. And I won't do it perfectly and not everyone will get it and maybe one or two people will be disappointed in my lame gift giving skills. But I'm more OK with that when I know it was never about that anyway. It's the cheesy truth of "presence vs. presents," the fact that I could never manufacture anyway what it looks like when souls rub shoulders-- though it rub them raw. Somehow, someway, we are enough-- as we are, no strings attached. Love and deep peace to you all.

A Long Exhale

The trees are thrashing angrily against the sky. I am watching– waiting for them to break down the horizon somehow, for their rage at their dying to finally catalyze change in the Way Things Are.

They've been still for much of the process so far, as pieces of the garments they've known slipped quietly to the floor. It's almost as though they didn't notice they were dying. But the moment has come: they know. And they grieve, as sharp rains lash their newly naked forms, as our backyard river laps sullen and gray at their chilled knees.

They endure this every year, this death of what was to make space for what will be, this slow, solemn exhale. And yet every year it still seems painful for them somehow, to lose so much of their recognizable form, to see their beauty strewn across the ground– to feel exposed.

I want to tell them I understand. I want to tell them there is a poignant, stark grace in their stripped-away forms, the lines of their empty arms reaching for the sky. I want to remind them that next year's coat is coming, but for now there is no dishonor in bearing frost instead of flowers– both are needed in their time. Yes, I want to stand beside them, feel the chill with them, and tell them all these things I am learning myself.

For after all, so many of us are in these seasons, this stripping away, bent between raging at the sky and somber, accepting stillness. So many of us know what it is to lose what we thought made us noteworthy– and so many of us now stand exposed.

But redemption throbs its pulse beneath every frost. Autumn hearts become winter hearts, all clear lines and the nebulous honesty of potential. And then... and then. New life realized.

I'll stand by my backyard trees and breathe out with them. We will weather this winter together.

Speak

I have recently started to talk a little bit about the fact that I struggled with a speech handicap as a child.

It seems like a small thing when I type it that way– matter of fact, black on white. But it wasn't a small thing at the time.

My best theory has been for a while now that it stemmed from the fact that my family completely uprooted our lives and moved to a third world country when I was just shy of 2 years old, only to do the same thing 18 months later when we returned to the States. When we first got back from mission work, we spent a stretch of time hopping from house to house, staying with whoever had room– an experience that deeply troubled 3-year-old Mary, who was clingy and insecure. I am told children with speech handicaps often are that way because of some massive life upheaval in the years they're developing speech. I figure this qualifies.

The primary way it manifested was that I couldn't pronounce any "R" sound, and "J" posed significant difficulties. In part because I was aware of the deficiency, I often ended up stuttering or slurring to cover it up. I spoke this way until I was 11 years old.

Imagine this dorktastic mini-human speaking a high percentage of words totally wrong.

11 is old enough to encounter an awful lot of bullying for any child who shows signs of abnormality. I was ridiculed for it so often (by relatives, friends, siblings, even adults on occasion) that I learned very early on not to speak much. I also learned early on the alternative: writing. Every word I was too ashamed to speak got turned around, invested, captured on a page. My expressions were primitive at first, rough, like any child holding a new tool in their hand. But I accelerated, leaning into the words, finding in their potential a way to be weightless. By 11 I was reading Shakespeare and writing my first novel.

But of course that wasn't usually particularly clear to the outside world, a world where I seemed branded as slow and stupid for the fact that I did not speak in public, or if I did, I could not seem to speak correctly. And it weighed on me tremendously.

My parents believed for a while that it was a discipline problem, and found various ways to try to motivate or punish me into speaking correctly. After one such night where it was explained to me that I just wasn't trying hard enough, I locked myself in the bathroom for hours. I painstakingly repeated words over and over, trying to make their sounds fall into place, looking in the mirror to try to make my mouth work the way everyone else's did so effortlessly. I fought with my unwieldy tongue until I was hoarse and sobbing, 8 years old and deeply convinced of the truth: I was a failure. I somehow had to try harder.

When I was 11, my mom found a book that they used in special speech therapy classes. We couldn't afford those kinds of classes, but my mom patiently sat down and started to work through it with me on our own. The book had diagrams, descriptions, and exercises. Somehow it clicked. And after a few days, I was able to say my own name correctly for the first time in my life: Mary Rose. I remember it caught in my throat.

The first reaction was fear. I had sounded a certain way for as long as I could speak, and now the familiarity afforded by that brokenness was being taken from me (I have always been this way: I would rather the familiar hurt than the unfamiliar hope). But soon the realization of being able to do it right, no longer being an outsider in the realm of speech, overtook that apprehension. Within a few months, most surface level traces of my old habits were gone.

I've been turning this over and over in my head lately as I've been exploring my desperate need for approval and how to overcome it. In a lot of ways, I am silenced by shame these days as surely as I was 13 years ago.

When I first learned to talk honestly about my life and my faith, it was new and hard and not always perfect but so beautiful. And then I started to realize I wasn't always doing it right (by the standards of others). I was sometimes too liberal, sometimes too conservative. Sometimes too "Christian," sometimes too irreverent. Sometimes too feminist, sometimes too traditional. Sometimes too intellectual, sometimes too simple. So I stopped speaking what I believe about a lot of things, and then I became afraid to believe those things at all, afraid to call attention to my wrongness. I began to feel any opinion at all was more valid than mine.

And it started bleeding into every other area of my life. I have heard people saying that things I have experienced are not valid, that they don't understand them-- so I stopped speaking the truth of those things I have lived, started trying to erase them from my presentation of myself. I have become ashamed of almost every aspect of my story. I am aware that for every moment I have lived, there is someone somewhere with an opinion that would say that's not right.

I am not particularly sure when I started focusing so much on what is approved rather than what is true. But I am extremely tired of it. I am weary of being afraid every waking moment that I'm not meeting someone's standard.

Throughout my teen years, the old speech habits of my childhood rarely surfaced. I only saw them in college in moments of extreme stress, such as before giving presentations in class. But last year I found something that could wake it: a demanding job in food service and a life mostly devoid of tangible human support.

On the bad days, there would be a chain of anxiety triggers, small things stacking, until I'd be taking someone's order and feel letters dropping out of my sentences, slurring, stammering, scattering in the noise. I'd fight to hold my pronounciation together. On a few occasions I ended up dashing to the bathroom where I locked myself in a dirty stall and dry heaved until the panic passed and my words arranged themselves again.

In a way, the upheaval of the last few years has triggered more than just the recurrence of that childhood monster. It's silenced me in those other ways, silenced my story, silenced much of my ability to be honest even with myself.

I am aware that my honesty would, in many cases, cause discomfort, disagreement, and potential heartache. I am aware that in other cases it could cause healing, a sense of resonance from others who have experienced similar things and do not feel free to express them. 

So these days I am constantly weighing the question: where is it worth it? Where does the potential for healing outweigh the potential for hurt? I don't believe in speaking my mind just for the sake of speaking; that quickly turns into arrogance, or gossip, or group pity parties. But I strongly believe in honesty for the purpose of healing, for having conversations that matter more, for true soul-deep closeness, for shedding light in dark places, for uncovering and recovering truth.

That second kind of honesty is the kind I am trying to uncover again, regardless of whether it would earn approval from the right list of people (whoever that is-- sometimes when I ask myself who are you trying to please, I can't even pin down a name). And I am trying to uncover it in a way that provides more healing than damage to others in the process. I would rather (always) be kind than "right," but there has to be a way to do that without feeling the need to evaporate as a kind of self-regulated damage control. I want my silences to become motivated only by gentleness, not by shame that tells me you can't say it right, can't be right– your hardest efforts are not trying hard enough. 

I want to leave this world marked more by mercy than when I found it, not embedded with the shrapnel of graceless rants. I don't particularly know the way to get there. But it's going to look like some careful relearning. It's going to look like practice. It's going to look like letting go of the fear that I am not really myself without my shame. 

It's going to look an awful lot like learning to speak.

Colorado 2014: Hearing Echoes

I was looking out the window at the mountains, seeing their dimensions blur into just another item on the list of things to miss, just another trip relegated to nostalgia.

I stared at the Colorado landscape until it flattened out into the plains, and then I settled back in my seat, jammed my earbuds in tighter, and turned up the volume on my iPod. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, slowing my breathing to encourage my brain to shut down, to stop moving, to stop thinking, to stop feeling. Three or four songs later, I gave up. I opened the notes app on my iPod to write.

“I feel tremendous, unspeakable grief.

But at least I feel something.”

***

I’d been in Colorado for two weeks, and it was my third major trip of the summer. My first two-- first to Texas, then to Wisconsin-- had been similarly beautiful, full of the people I am closest to, full of adventures, full of a heart slowly opening under the warmth of beautiful moments and an awareness of God. Both times, I’d returned to Tennessee optimistic, brimming with a sweet, irrational hope. Both times, within a few weeks I simply felt nothing.

This has become the familiar status quo since moving out here as newlyweds, uncertain and isolated and broke. It feels like last week that we got here-- mostly because so few of the days between have seemed real to me. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like when I got here my ability to emotionally engage anything completely disappeared. It happened so suddenly and completely that it took me six months before I realized how numb I’d become.

For a while, earlier this year, I worried that I might be headed towards considering suicide again (a pattern that was so built into my existence as a teenager that I am always wary of it resurfacing). It wasn’t until my trip to Texas in May that I realized I didn’t want to end my life: I felt like it was already over, and a part of me was grieving. And it wasn’t until I went to Wisconsin later that I realized there was still the possibility of life, the reality of a different way, and it was going to have to be a spiritual mending, not a change of circumstances.

I don’t want to seem over-dramatic or present an unbalanced picture-- though I am discussing my struggles here, there have been successes as well as struggles. This has been far, far from my worst year. I have, in some ways, been healthier than I’ve ever been this past year, at least in terms of functionality. I am usually intensely self-aware, which is (like most things) both good and bad. But even that self-awareness has been dulled as of late, reduced to simply the thought I am not who I want to be.

Good things happen, and I struggle to be grateful for them, struggle to experience joy. Bad things happen, and even if I repeat them to myself over and over again, I can’t feel the weight of them.

And I’ve woken up in the morning countless times since moving here to find I’d been crying in my sleep, only able to engage when the walls of consciousness were obliterated.

I’ve realized what a large part of it is (although this is only one aspect of it, and it’s much more multi-faceted than this; this is only a blog post, after all). I am absolutely addicted to the approval of others. It wasn’t always this way, since for much of my life I received so few doses of approval an addiction to it couldn’t even form. But these past several years it’s become increasingly worse. And as much as I crave that approval, I am also painfully aware at any given time of how far short of that perception I actually fall-- I am plagued by that common fear if people really knew me, they’d think so much differently. This to say that I can’t usually accept the affirmation I’m offered, which makes it a spectacularly unhelpful and unhealthy addiction.

I’ve been completely isolated from the approval of most people for over a year now. Not just isolated from approval, but from their kindness, their interest, their friendship, as well-- simply because I am isolated from most people, as previously discussed many times. I have reached the place now where I have accepted I will very likely never have a community here, and I need to learn how to live with that reality. Which has meant I am left alone to face again a distaste for myself that I can’t even fully put into words.

I hate that I want people to affirm me, still, after all these years (my brain screams this is a middle school flaw everyone else your age is over). I hate that I feel so underqualified for every single aspect of life I’m facing right now. I hate that I can’t get over myself and just be content, that I can be so deeply self-centered despite years of fighting so hard to see, to love other people. And many days, even as I throw myself in frustration against the walls of my metaphorical isolation chamber, I know the vacuum of relationship is to be expected. Why would anyone like me? I don’t like me. I can’t blame anyone else for feeling similarly.

So I stop feeling. I know I am still deeply in need of internal change because of this: it’s as though without people to remind me who I am, I cease to exist at all.

***

I got to Colorado this year feeling, honestly, skeptical. I’ve started to hear this voice in the back of my head, whispering grown ups don’t have meaningful life experiences anymore. You’re married and employed and your name’s on an apartment lease-- it’s all over for you in terms of living vibrantly. You barely have time to talk to these people outside of this yearly meeting anymore. They won’t remember who you are, or you’ll all have changed so much there will be no relationship left.

I was proven wrong in the span of the first hour or two.

Between flipping stations in the car and critiquing the songs on the radio, cramming into a kitchen full of friends, downing multiple cups of coffee, being hugged half a dozen times, and getting into a conversation about theology and contemporary Western culture less than 30 minutes after “hello,” I started to realize that maybe life still happens to me-- in me.

Our group gathering was only three days this year, the shortest it’s ever been. It was rushed and certainly different from when we were all teenagers, but I was reminded over and over again that some things don’t change-- that things I believed to be lost are actually still very real, albeit in different forms. I would stay in Colorado for another week and a half afterwards, watching movies, running on mountain trails, lying under the stars, soaking in conversations about things that matter, trying my hand at honesty. I felt my faith waking up under my skin. It was like I’d been given permission to believe again, permission to meet God’s eyes and accept that maybe He was still steadfastly paying attention to me.

It wouldn’t be until I was on the plane home that I would understand it: that has ultimately been the question, this whole time since moving here. It was never why am I in a soul-crushing food service job? It was never why did I have to leave behind friends and family I love so deeply? It was never why can’t I make friends-- why can’t I even want to make friends? It was never why am I being placed in a job I am spectacularly undeserving of? I thought those were my questions, the ones that left me numb, but they weren’t. The real question was very simple: does God still like me?

I’m not going to pretend that two weeks in Colorado fixed that. But it tied some threads of grace to my heart that I pray will become highways for hope before they can be severed.

Because when friends who have known me long and listened to the worst of me told me I am kind, I began to believe I could be again. And when they told me they trust me, I began to feel like perhaps I was worth trusting. And when they told me that the things I think about God resonated with how they think about Him too, I started to feel for the first time in a very long time that I’m not a total failure of a Christian, that maybe grace is still absorbing all my doubts-- that He still thinks I’m worth the risk of Calvary.

By the end, I was feeling everything again, leaning my forehead against a smudged pane of glass on the airplane, crying in a movie-ready moment of catharsis. And I realized that yes, maybe I would lose the ability to feel. Maybe all my clarity would melt under the harsh pressure of isolation and routine. But it was only maybe-- not an absolute. The same God (who knows the worst and still stays) my friends echoed was in Nashville. That same God was with me on the plane. That first inclination of comfort, of freedom from myself, that I’ve felt in months-- it was from the One who, no matter where I go, I can’t outrun. I will never find a place where His grace is not.

In the office of a music industry icon who will likely not remember my name.

On the bedroom carpet when the anxiety comes like a maelstrom again.

In the silent apartment where I wait for hours for my roommate and my husband to come home.

Navigating the aisles of a chain grocery store where every half-familiar angle makes me homesick for my siblings.

Sidestage for one of my favorite bands.

Trekking across the scorched pavement where I run to subdue the lies I’ve heard.

He inhabits all the blank spaces left by the goodbyes I’ve said in order to follow Him.

And someday I think I’m going to hear Him say again that I’m forgiven, that I don’t have to hide anymore, that I don’t have to wake up every morning so ashamed of an existence that seems incapable of being what it should be.

I’m not quite there yet. But as I caught my second flight and ate the gluten free pancake and peanut butter sandwiches and Mickey Mouse fruit snacks a friend had packed for me… I felt a little closer.

A Heart With A Limp

Sometimes I write about my experiences with depression and anxiety.

But too often, like lately, I stay quiet.

I do this in part for valid reasons, but (if I’m painfully honest) primarily from fear. But lately something’s been tugging at the corners of my mind, inviting me to let bits of my story spill over the edges of the rigid regulation of my shiny social media image.

When my husband and I moved post-wedding, initially all my attention was focused on the tasks at hand: unpacking. Finding a job. Settling in. Getting stabilized financially. Finding a routine. Figuring out how to get to the grocery store without a GPS.

So it wasn’t until well into our time here that I started recognizing that I really hadn’t set up mental health habits well in this new location.

Over the past seven years, I have set certain routines in place to help with the healing process that I suspect will be ongoing for most of my life. If I keep the process moving, I am higher-functioning than I (or many of the people around me) would ever have dreamed I would be when I was a teenager. But when those habits get disarrayed, or when a trigger disrupts them, I begin to fray around the edges.

After May being the best month in a very long time, the past few weeks have seen days at a time where things unraveled again. The feelings of waking up with lead instead of lungs, of being suddenly too exhausted to move for no reason at all, of knowing with pain stronger than rationality that nothing will be OK again, of struggling to keep food down or even to breathe because someone used punctuation in a text that your hyper-analyzing, anxiety-fueled brain is sure means they suddenly hate you-- these things elbowed their way into my days again.

None of this is new, and for the sake of perspective, it’s nowhere near as bad as things I’ve faced before. But if I’m honest, that doesn’t mean it’s not intensely discouraging at moments. I keep refusing to let it win, refusing to let it stop me from being kind, trying to connect to people, exercising, cooking, working, laughing, reading, singing-- breathing. And sometimes my fear of being rejected or written off as an ungrateful complainer means I don’t mention the fight at all, a selfish lack of honesty which I know ultimately does more harm than good to everyone around me. But there are moments where I’m just impossibly tired of this.

I repeat my life back to myself like a list to remind myself that this isn’t all there is to me: I am named by Grace Himself, not by my actions. I am in love and loved, with a marriage that’s been so smooth it’s almost unnerving. I have a kind, grace-full apartment-mate who miraculously actually chooses to hang out with me. I have some of the most amazing friends in the world, and even if they’re distant most of the time, I get to do things like get on a plane to go see them. I am working my dream job with incredible bosses who I respect and trust, and coworkers who it is a joy to walk with. I have a family who I am fiercely loyal to, and who returns that loyalty to me.

And I’m thankful for all those things. So thankful that sometimes I spontaneously start crying because they are a grace I have not earned and barely dared hope for. I frequently need reminders that all these things are true. 

But one of the most frustrating things about depression and anxiety is that they often refuse to respect reality. I can wake up to face a day full of music and coffee and work that’s really more like play… and still feel like I’m breathing ash, like my life isn’t an event worth getting out of bed for.

This isn’t going to be a post with a tidy wrap-up message. Although as I write this I’ve had a string of better days, I hold them loosely, knowing I am still vulnerable. I have to give myself permission to admit to my incompleteness.

But what this experience does keep pushing me back into is this reality that I wrote about a couple months ago: there has to be more than circumstantial alignment, than relational ideals, even than wellness, to lend order to this disordered heart. I may not be able to resolve that tension entirely on earth, but navigating it is a huge part of my faith journey. Not because Jesus is a self-help method or a cure-all for the unpleasant (that is a version of “gospel” that I find incredibly hollow and untrue), but because in my personal story, I have rarely been so grateful for the presence of God as I am when Christ comes quietly into my aching and sits beside me. The Heart that weathered Gethsemane whispers simply I know.

Though I will by no means ever give up on getting well, on letting these experiences make me compassionate, on becoming more myself every day, there is a part of me that can be almost grateful for the fact that my heart walks with a perpetual limp. I will never have to look far for reminders that surface level success and circumstantial gifts are transients in my life. I carry in myself the constant reminder that I need a much more permanent kind of hope to move in to stay.

And for those of you who read this from the heart of a similar battle: if you’re breathing today, you are brave. Don’t give up.

I know one day all of our scars will disappear like the stars at dawn

and all of our pain will fade away when morning comes.

And on that day when we look backwards, we will see that everything is changed

and all of our trials will be as milestones on the way.

- Thrice

All OK

If I could tell the world just one thing

It would be that we’re all OK.
- Jewel

When I was 4 years old, my mom, two older siblings, and then-infant brother were in a very serious car wreck.

When they got home from the hospital after a day where I waited scared with my 2-year-old sister and a babysitter, my mom and my big brother (who had both sustained serious injuries) settled down to rest. The big brother I hero-worshipped my whole childhood was laid out on the couch in the living room, vivid stitches tracing his forehead in long dark lines, still and quiet as I rarely saw him. My mom rested in her bed, her face black and blue, her arm in a cast.

At the time our rapidly growing 7-person family was living crammed into a tiny house little bigger than your average apartment, so there was just one corner to dash around to move from one invalid to the other. With a deep sense of urgency, I dashed back and forth around that corner, breathlessly asking one question over and over: are you OK?

I didn’t understand how to help, but I was incredibly determined to try. I brought my big brother coloring books and crayons, I brought him some favorite toys, I sat at his side and anxiously watched to see if they would make him better. He seemed grateful, and also tried in his own way to reassure me. I watched him try to engage the things I brought him, but really he just needed rest, so eventually I lapsed into silence and stillness, broken occasionally by the same question all over again: are you OK?

It’s been just about two years shy of two decades since I was that kid. But the more I come to understand myself and the events that are significant to me, the more I understand that I’ve spent a very large portion of the past eight years of my life doing the exact same thing: running back and forth from one person I love to the next, knowing they’re wounded (everybody is in some way), desperate to help, earnestly asking over and over again if they’re OK.

The things that have caused me the most grief in my adult life have not been people who wronged me or betrayed me. Those are things I honestly barely remember more than a moment most of the time. Instead, I have felt the most heartache when I see someone suffering and can’t stem the flow of their tears or bind their ruptured heart’s arteries, when I ask if they’re OK and the lump in their throat makes it so tight they can’t even answer, when nothing I bring them seems to help them get well.

These things haunt me. I want to love people, to be kind, to be a conduit of the compassion I find in Christ. And yet half the time I feel like the 4-year-old dumping coloring books on the lap of her brother with a severe head wound. What can crayons do against wounds such as these?

When I was a teenager, I had to learn how to be OK with myself not being OK (a lesson I will likely spend a lifetime re-learning). Now I am having to learn how to be OK with the fact that the people I love won’t always be OK right away, and maybe sometimes it’s not my fault-- because honestly it’s not about me at all.

There is a kind of self-absorption to thinking that the only chance for a person’s life to be made whole is for it to be made better by me. I vividly remember a night many years ago now when a friend I’d tried desperately to help was nevertheless in a lonely psychiatric ward under suicide watch, and I felt beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was because I’d failed to love her adequately. One of my dearest friends sat with me late into the night, and at one point she told me very softly I don't mean to be harsh, but it’s arrogance to believe you have that much control over someone’s life, that it’s entirely up to you whether they live or die.

I suspect to some people that would in fact sound harsh, but to me it held unbelievable freedom. It gave me freedom to grieve with and for my friend without feeling the burden of belief that her fate hinged on me.

So I’m learning it’s OK to wait with people, to sit in the silence, to get comfortable in the chaos, to cry over the phone with them without needing to offer a these are five incredibly wise steps towards fixing all this mess. We’re people in process. We’re not there yet. And that’s a beautiful and hopeful thing in itself, if I allow it to be.

And sometimes maybe showing up with coloring books isn’t a bad idea-- although now for me instead I usually show up with cups of coffee and rock song suggestions and a few awkward hugs. And something I’ve learned is that even if I express my caring so imperfectly, the fact that I’m trying to express it at all sometimes is what matters.

While I wait for the smoke to clear,
you don't even have to speak.
Just sit with me in the ashes here
and together we can pray for peace.
- Jason Gray

Moments in the Press Room

I had a moment last night.

I’d spent a couple hours standing on a red carpet for a major Christian music industry event, toting a camera, firing questions at some of my heroes. Now I was sitting in a cold, dark, almost eerily quiet press room backstage at one of the most famous venues in the country, alternately watching the feed of the night’s event and photographing nominees and presenters as they took turns on our press stage. Much of the night had already passed, and I’d made a thousand memories I knew would stay with me for a lifetime.

An unassuming artist took the press room stage, her dark curls comfortably, beautifully disarrayed, wearing boots with her dress in an act of irony similar to my own perpetual converse-with-formal-wear rebellion. I’d met her earlier that night on the red carpet, shook hands, exchanged names, and managed all of the above without anything out of the ordinary occurring. But as she started answering questions, I found myself grateful for a camera to press against my face to hide the reality that I was rapidly blinking back tears.

She was answering a question about the stories her songs tell-- stories much darker than most others in her industry, stories most are afraid to tell. She talked about how she was drawn to the dark because unapologetically admitting to it enabled hope to be a more rich reality, the contrast driving truth deeper home. And as she talked about this, suddenly I wasn’t hardcore professional Mary with my stack of all access laminates in a drawer at home and the confidence to stand on the fringes of a stage taking pictures in front of thousands of people. I was 15 year old Mary, sitting in a dark room with one of this artist’s songs on repeat on my cheap MP3 player, rocking back and forth and trying to dive so deep into the music that maybe-- just maybe-- for two seconds the pain would stop.

I still get moments like this often. I’d had one earlier that night when in the midst of a totally professional conversation with Scott Stapp, he spoke his story and unknowingly echoed my own, and for a split second I remembered being a teenager hanging on every word of Creed’s “One Last Breath.” I had another one a few days earlier when Jon Foreman sang again the dare that’s chased me for the past seven years: move. I dare you. And I had it a few months ago when I stood sidestage during a Skillet performance and cried yet again through the song that started this entire wild music ride for me.

And these moments aren’t instances of self-pity or sorrow for the past and the person I was. They’re moments simply where the brilliance of truth stabs at my chest with sudden piercing clarity, where I remember who I am, where I came from, and why I’m doing what I do.

My involvement with the music scene has been kind of like the most drama-filled highschool dating episode imaginable, but as I’m settling into a new role and a time where (ostensibly) there is a calm in the emotional storm, one of the things I swear to myself is that I won’t forget what started it all or what’s kept me here even when I felt frustrated or like I’d defined the call on my life entirely wrong.

Because I’m not on the red carpets or stages or press rooms or mics for myself or for anyone’s approval. I’m there because music has so often been the only thing that brought me outside of myself, that admitted to where I was while whispering that maybe-- just maybe-- there was something better to come. And I’m there because I would wear myself out on a million weekends like this last one to help connect other people to that same experience.

I am of the philosophy that music isn’t always supposed to throw answers at you, but it sure helps an awful lot with wrestling through the questions, with keeping your heart beating long enough so you can reach those answers.

So no matter where I go in this field, I hope I never stop having those tear-stained moments where I’m 15 again. I hope I never stop singing the songs that meet me in my questions, in my journey towards truth-- towards Christ. And I hope I never, ever forget that I’m doing this because of the millions of other people whose lives would change if they had those moments too.

Soli Deo gloria.