Teacher? Lawyer? Preacher? On Trusting God to Make My Paths Straight

When I was eight years old my grandfather asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I thought through all the jobs the adults I knew had--teacher, coach, truck driver--and all the jobs people on TV had--doctor, news anchor, deep sea diver. I scrolled through these jobs like you’d scroll through your Facebook feed, looking for a satisfying place to stop. I said to my grandfather, yanking the truth from my gut, “A preacher.” I said this on a Sunday night at church, just before the service started, just before he’d climb the stairs and deliver the sermon he’d worked on all week. This job of his seemed like the best job I could imagine. Who wouldn’t want to spend all day reading and teaching about God?

That night he’d smile as if I’d picked both the exact right and exact wrong answer. I’d spend the next 25 years figuring out why.

I’m in my mid-thirties, and if you’d asked me, even just two or three years ago, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I probably wouldn’t have had a clear answer. That’s because my journey into a profession has been anything but straightforward. Maybe the murkiness started at eight when the thing I most wanted to be wasn’t something for me, not in the way I understood it then. Since then, it’s been a lot of wandering in the dark.

In middle school I said I wanted to find a cure for cancer. In high school I decided to be a lawyer. Then a news anchor. Then a judge. Then, briefly, a Judge Attorney General for the American Navy. In college I jumped back onto the lawyer track, majored in English, which spurred a desire to read books all day, and promptly switched my professional goals to either publishing or professoring. When I graduated college without having been accepted to an advanced degree program (because I didn’t apply), I decided to try my hand at house-wifing. Which I hated and was bad at. Unless you count binge-watching TLC as a house-wifing skill. I was great at that.

Eventually, I got a job at a newspaper as a reporter. I’d always been a good writer, was the college paper editor. But I quit reporting six months in to go to graduate school for English. I was great at grad school, leading me to wonder if perhaps I should just go forever. Instead, I took a job after graduation teaching freshmen how to read and write critically. I’d leave that job after two years to go to New York City with my husband to plant a church. That effort would end after only a year, and I’d find myself back in the same town in which I attended college, once again questioning my future, this time while I carried and birthed two little girls.

For the next seven years I’d struggle with my vocation. During those years I taught some, both about writing and about God. I learned photography and videography. I wrote a lot. Received a few rejection letters for book and article proposals (most editors didn’t bother to write back). And I prayed. I prayed that God would make a way for me. That He’d show me where to go and what to be.

And the whole time I was mostly a mess about it.

It all came to a dramatic head when my husband and I finally decided to enroll our girls in public school. For the first time since before they were born, I had the opportunity to pursue full time employment. And I cried about it every day.

We needed me to work. We needed the money. But I refused to consider jobs. I wanted to throw up every time Justin asked me what I wanted to do. I didn’t know why I felt that way, so viscerally opposed to teaching English or working for a marketing company or a newspaper, but I did. At first I thought I was afraid. Then I thought maybe I was unsure of myself. But when it came right down to it, when my husband pushed and pried and basically shoved his hand down my throat and yanked up the the truth, he found that same truth I’d told my Papa at eight years old. I wanted to be a preacher.

No, not a preacher. I wanted to read and teach about God all day.

There it was, clear as day, my vocation.

All along, I had been wanting to do one thing. All along I’d been pushing against everything that wasn’t it. All along I’d been unintentionally learning how to do it better--cultivating my skills as a teacher, reader, problem solver, leader, discerner and writer. Working alongside my husband in ministry, teaching Bible classes, creating church environments and events, building websites and online communities, reading my Bible like it might burn up before I had the chance to finish...

All along the path seemed dark and mysterious and full of what seemed like dead ends, but all along God was laying track.

I started writing tonight in response to Proverbs 3:5-6. I needed to write a short devotional for a website (this is already much too long). It’s a famous passage. You know it:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart

   and lean not on your own understanding;

in all your ways submit to him,

   and he will make your paths straight.

For whatever reason, when I read this tonight, I thought about all those years when trust was so hard, when sight was nil and faith was all, when I leaned on God like a blind woman with a cane, tapping around in the dark, looking for curbs and ditches--God, cane and curb.

I don’t know that I submitted my ways to Him every day, but I sure did try. I prayed a hundred times, “God, I just want to do what you want me to do. Show me what you want me to do.”

I didn’t know it then, but always He has been making my paths straight.

Since that day when Justin helped me see clearly, when we realized what it was I was made to do, neither of us have ever wavered in our commitment to the call--even though then it seemed crazy and still it takes trust, leaning not on our understanding.

If you’d asked me if there was a way for a woman to make a living in ministry within the churches of Christ, I’d have said, No way. And yet, here I am, writing books, speaking at churches and conferences, on staff at my church enabling testimonies, helping with communication and online community. Under my name on our church website is the word “Minister.” I’m pinching myself like ten times a day.

In some ways, I see more clearly what God’s up to now. And that makes the trust easier, of course. But I’m still tempted, perhaps more tempted, to make my own way, to push my own agenda, to set my own goals and chart my own course. I think, "I see what you're doing, God. I'll take it from here."

Nope.

I don’t know why this is the thing I wrote tonight. I tried to write something else. Maybe God wanted one of you wandering in the fog of uncertainty to know that trust works when the will of God is what you're seeking most. Trusting is like walking on an ever unfolding path, you can't see any path ahead, but every time you take a step your foot falls on solid ground. Maybe that's why I wrote this tonight and stayed up too late editing it. Whatever the reason, it's what I wrote, and I’m reminded of two things in the writing:

1. When we submit to God, He takes us where we need to go.

2. There’s always somewhere more to go.

Thus, I’m not done trusting.

Devoted to the Present: How to Enable the Best Future

If you know me or if you’ve read anything I’ve ever written, you probably know about my theory of open hands. As far as I can tell, the only way to live is with the understanding that just about anything (stuff, people, jobs, etc.) could be taken from you at any given moment. I feel this way because that’s been my experience--a brother who died at 20, a couple miscarriages, a house that refused to sell for four years and sat empty while we paid two mortgages every month and drained our bank account, a job that disappeared the day I finally got pregnant again. Just a few weeks ago the diamond fell out of my engagement ring. This is the beginning of a long list. I’ve found that just when you try to hold onto something it slips from between your fingers. That’s why I’ve stopped holding on so tight. I have given up on expectations of the future.

Living with open hands means assuming a posture of trust when it comes to life and God. I stand with hands open, and He can take anything He wants. And if the devil steps in and takes something (which he often does), I trust God to make it right, to make me right, or put something else in my hands.

Knowing I could lose anything--that my kids could get cancer, that my husband could leave, that I could get Alzheimer’s and suddenly be unable to write--could push me to disengage with life. And maybe that’s what you’d think open hands is, a decision not to get too invested in my kids or my marriage or my career. But that’s not it at all, not for me. I don’t ever want to drop what’s in my hands. I’d never treat it carelessly. No, I treasure it. I hold every good thing like my little girl holds a flower, tenderly, careful not to crush it. For me, the thought that something might disappear tomorrow means I’m fully invested today.

Living with open hands frees me to stop worrying about what might happen and instead enter what is happening, to be present and engaged, fearless and thankful.

I had a friend recently ask me about open hands, about how to move forward when you drop your expectations of the future. She’s a young woman and likely most of her life is ahead of her--though she doesn’t want to bank on that. Still, she needs to make some plans. Right?

How do you make plans for the future without putting much stock in the promise of tomorrow? What does it look like to discern and execute next steps when you know full well they might be derailed?

I love this question, and I think it’s closely allied to a less wise (though not unwise), more common question I get from young folks all the time: How do I know what God wants for my future?  

Let’s start with a story about an eight year old cleaning her room. Because that’s just the place you thought I’d start, right?

The other day I asked my daughter Eve to clean her room. For whatever reason, cleaning her room is Eve’s least favorite activity on the planet. Like, if I mention that she’ll have to clean her room while we’re out to dinner, she’ll melt into a puddle of stress and anxiety. This day, she immediately decided she needed to go the bathroom for 45 minutes. When I finally made her buckle down she wept for two hours. Loudly. No breaks. I made her clean while she cried because crying is no excuse for disobedience, but I couldn’t make her not cry. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.

At some point in the process my husband went in and said, “Eve, you may take as long as you want to clean this room. You can clean it for an hour or for two weeks. You can still be cleaning this room tomorrow. I don’t care. But. You can’t do anything else until it’s clean. No movies. No Barbies. Nothing other than room cleaning.”

This seemed wise to me, but it made things much, much worse. Now Eve sounded like a torture victim.

So I called her out to the living room for a chat. “What is going on?” I asked like the gentle, patient mother I am. She replied, devastation dripping from her tear-soaked words, “I don’t (sniff) want to be (sniff) cleaning (sniff) my room (sniff) tomorrooooow.”

And then it hit me. Eve hates to clean her room, because she thinks ahead to how long she thinks it’s going to take. She obsesses over the amount of work it will be in the future when she finally has to do it. Eve’s room cleaning woes are entirely future oriented.

So I said, “Eve, if you spend all your time thinking about how your room won’t ever get clean, your room won’t ever get clean.” I said, “Eve, you’re living in the future. If you jump in and clean your room with all your strength and mind right now, you won’t be cleaning your room tomorrow. You’ll be done tomorrow.” I said, “Honestly, you could be done in thirty minutes if you’d just stop avoiding it and do it”

This is the kind of speech parents often give that almost never works. But apparently God sprinkled magic dust on this speech and it worked and thirty minutes later the room was clean and my daughter, though puffy-eyed, was happy.

Later that night at dinner Eve said, “Thanks for the pep talk tonight, Mom.”*

Here’s the pep talk for you as you consider your future: Often, as in almost all the time, the best thing to do to prepare for the future is to fully inhabit the present. When you’re worried about what’s coming or when you’re not worried but don’t know the next step, either way, you can find peace in knowing that a well-lived present best serves your future goals.

Wondering what to “be” when you grow up? Be who you most want to be right now, no growing up required. Passionately pursue your interests and talents. Seek out mentors, people who currently do what you love to do and want to do more of. Learn the things you want to learn. Read the books you want to read. Build stuff. Make stuff. Lead stuff. And do it now.

Want to be successful professionally? Worried about an upcoming opportunity for promotion? The best thing you can do is to do good work now, to be a stellar employee in the present.

Want to get married one day but can’t find a quality partner? Invest in the relationships you have now--relationships with parents and co-workers and friends. Learn how to navigate conflict with grace. Learn how to prioritize another person. Take trips together. Sacrifice for one another. And for goodness’ sake, if you have the chance, go on a date tonight.

Embrace today’s opportunities and you’ll sow healthy seeds for tomorrow’s harvest (if tomorrow comes).

For years I thought about what it would be like to write and publish a book. I had notebooks full of ideas, but no manuscripts. I had lots of expectations for the future: one day I’ll be a writer, I’ll write a bunch of books, I’ll be in bookstores, maybe I’ll go to fancy parties and read my books… But I had little to no action in the present.

I was never going to read one of my books at a fancy party in the future if I never wrote a book now.

Now I write books. I’m writing all the time. There’s never a time when I’m without a book in the wings and a book on my desktop. I’m not achieving all those early book publishing dreams and expectations, but lo and behold, that’s not a problem at all. I’ve learned that the joy and excitement isn’t in publishing a book or reading it in front of other people, it’s in the day to day act of writing one. The joy isn’t waiting somewhere in the future. It’s right here, today.

For years, I missed out on that joy because I didn’t know how easy it was to grab hold of. I’ve learned life is a series of present moments; and if you miss those moments, your eyes distracted by the future, you’ll miss your life.

If you want a future life worth living, devote yourself to the present.

When you commit to living with open hands, to trust in God and not be derailed by the unexpected bumps and losses, to not expect or demand certain outcomes, that doesn’t mean you give up on charting a course. It just means you set a loose, wise course (based on who you are now and what you’ve been given by God to steward in the present), and then you get going, doing, making, and moving.

Make the plan, work the plan, but never let the plan be your god or Master. When re-routing inevitably comes, embrace it and identify the next best step, the step you can take today.

-

*I learned later that Justin said almost exactly the same thing. Sometimes a thing must be said twice to be heard.

When A Hurricane Hits

I was four when Hurricane Elena hit. When I thought about it today at the grocery store, standing in line alongside every person in my town, buying bread and water to prep for Hurricane Harvey, I remembered being six or seven. But I Googled to confirm, and I was four--a four year old spending the night on a sleeping bag in a high school with my mom and dad, my three year old brother and my grandmother who’d driven toward the storm with a cooler full of food when she heard we’d have to leave the house, a house in the woods by a river less than a mile from the coast.

Over a million people on the Gulf Coast were evacuated in the days before Elena finally made landfall. She spun and swirled in the Gulf, where she’d land no one knew. Maybe Weeki Wachi, Florida. Maybe our little, fragile home. We waited nervously like middle schoolers playing spin the bottle.

My husband was six when Elena hit. He lived in Houston, just across the warm water. He remembers the warnings and playing in flooded streets.

I remember my dad boarding up the windows. I remember one wide hallway from the high school we stayed in. I can see my little hands reaching into a cooler. I remember standing in an open door, watching the rain pummeling the parking lot, cool fresh air on my tiny anxious face.

I wonder what we did with the dog.

A reporter took a picture of me at the high school, me and my favorite doll. It ran in the paper that week, and my other grandmother clipped it and kept it for twenty years. Lately she’s been sending me all the clippings she kept. She says she doesn’t want me to have to throw it all away after she dies. I can just throw it away now. In the picture from the paper I’m looking at the camera, my Cabbage Patch Kid hanging by my side. It’s exactly the kind of picture people use in newspapers and magazines to tell stories of devastation. I look like a little refugee--my hair a mess, my clothes rumpled, my face painted a thick coat of concern, my one possession in my tightly closed hands.

I thought of this image as I watched the coverage of flooding in Houston and Corpus Christi, Port Aransas. I thought of it, too, as I walked from photograph to photograph in a gallery in Denver just a few days earlier, a show comprised of large black and white images of African refugees, each one in dirty clothes, probably their only clothes, often holding tight to some possession.

All of these images have me remembering the few times in my life when I, too, have been displaced, pushed from my home by the threat of violence. Times like Hurricane Elena. Or the year my grandmother got cancer and my parents moved me to a new school and a new house, away from the small house in the woods on the river and into a subdivision and a shared room with my brother and cold terrazzo floors. And then moved me again a year later, into my grandfather’s house, a house haunted by the memory of my grandmother who’d died of that cancer.

If you’d taken a picture of me from that time I’d have certainly been wearing my Boca Ciega Pirates hoodie, the thing I wore as I sat courtside watching my grandmother coach basketball. After she died, I pulled the hood over my head, tucked my size small knees into the size large cotton, and held tight to the drawstrings. My parents tried in vain to make me wear anything else.

Hurricane Elena, the looming danger of the late summer of 1985, did not hit Weeki Wachi, FL. It made a last minute adjustment and hit Mississippi causing a billion dollars worth of damage. But my little house survived, not even a broken window. I’d get to live in it for two more years before tragedy would force us out again.

-

Growing up on the water in Florida, I learned how to track a hurricane. We’d do it in school, plot the movement with pins on big blue maps. The local papers would include maps for you to plot at home. Our schools sent hurricane preparedness brochures to our parents. Signs flanked the roads--”Hurricane evacuation route.” Local bars threw hurricane parties. On Saturdays I turned on the TV and rooted for my football team, the Miami Hurricanes.

When Hurricane Andrew hit south Florida my family drove down to help with the clean up. My grandfather said he stood in a subdivision leveled like a forest cut down for lumber and cried.

We knew Andrew was coming. Knew it would hit somewhere. Knew the flooding and winds would be devastating. But standing there where a home should be and isn’t, watching families wade through debris looking for something, anything that might have survived the storm, a wedding album, a pet, a stuffed animal… That’s different. There are few losses as complete and as devastating as the loss of home.

A friend of mine recently lost her mother and her father. The grief was heavy, but she’d experienced grief before. Lost a child even. This feeling was different. She called her friend, a counselor, and asked, “What is this?” And her friend, wise and warm, said, “When your parents are both dead you don’t have a home. You’re not just grieving your parents; you’re grieving the loss of home.”

I spent last week on vacation in the mountains. Everything was peace and joy, simplicity and wholeness. Two days after I came home a Hurricane charged my state like a bull in a fight and a friend of mine’s brother died in a tragic accident at work. He was in his thirties, healthy, raising a daughter on his own. My friend, wrecked, drove almost seven hours to get to his body. I texted a few words, our small group sent flowers, but I’m sitting here tonight, rain that won’t stop falling outside my window, knowing there’s just not much I can do. I am on the periphery of this storm, standing in the rain saved from the flood, watching my people suffer.

Back in Denver, in that gallery with the pictures of refugees, I wondered, Why is this art? It’s history, certainly. Journalism, sure. But art? To stand in a room full of broken hearts and dirty clothes and messy hair? To look at people in their hardship? To stare at their worst? I said to my husband, To capture only a person’s weakness is to make them less human. I think that’s true. But thinking as I have about my friends in pain, my fellow Texans underwater, everyone forced out their homes for one reason or another--flooding, death, divorce, war, eviction, foreclosure, change--I wonder if I simply looked with the wrong eyes. I wonder if I looked and saw difference when I should have looked and seen sameness. I wonder if the pictures made me pity when the goal was to make me remember: Home is fragile. Today it’s them. Tomorrow it’s you.

Homelessness can happen to us all. Sometimes we forget that up in the mountains, breathing clean air, eating grapes and goat cheese, loved and loving, isolated from the tides of loss common in the valley. We forget that everything is temporary. That even our home, the wood and glass and plaster or the flesh and bones and laughter, can be swept up and out from under us.

What do you do with that? How do we navigate a world where people are mist and hurricanes wipe out houses and wars uproot whole nations?

Tonight I saw a video of semi trucks from our local Texas grocery store headed into the most damaged coastal cities with food and water. Twelve trucks all loaded with nourishment, generosity, love, provision. The trucks included mobile kitchens capable of serving 2500 people a hot meal in an hour.

In my city there’s this organization that teaches refugee women how to sew. They get them sewing machines and help them get jobs. They also find mentors for refugee kids, people who can help them navigate the transition, practice the new language, people to be the aunts and uncles they left behind in Syria or Somalia.

When my friend’s brother died this week, my church put out a call for financial assistance. He hadn’t had life insurance. They needed help with the funeral. By the time I logged on to donate, maybe two hours after the church wide email, they’d raised over $4,500.

Maybe when home can be wiped away, we become people willing to bring home to the displaced. Maybe we pick up our little sticks and pile them up with other people’s sticks and make sturdy, safe nests.

Yes, those nests might be wiped away. If they are, we’ll build them again. And again.

-

When my grandmother died, my family moved in with my grandfather. He picked me up from school every day. I spent Sunday afternoons in his office at the church building. My grandmother dying brought us closer, bound us to one another, pushed us to be more for one another. We built something beautiful from the ugly shrapnel of grief. And then, about a year after her death, a few days before my ninth birthday, my grandfather had a heart attack. He actually suffered the brunt of it in the bathtub at our house. Being a fireman he knew what was happening, but being stubborn he refused to call 911. Instead he climbed into the bathtub and asked me to knock on the door every ten minutes. He said, “If I don’t answer, call your dad.”

Later at the clinic, watching doctors and nurses rush him out of the building and into an ambulance on a stretcher, pumping air into his lungs, his eyes closed, I thought, “This is how it will always be. Everyone I love will die.”

Every home I build will be washed out to sea.

I’m sharing this story because I don’t want to end this inauthentically, all sunshine and elbow grease and resilience. Humans are gallant and capable and, filled with the Holy Spirit of God our Father and King, they are a mighty force. We cannot ignore or deny the power of people getting up and trying again, people sharing their lives with others, risking their lives for others, people bound together by the task of making a safe place for shelter, provision, belonging and peace.

But.

We can’t fix everything. Even empowered by God, home isn’t easy to rebuild or remake. We can (and should and must) love more and help more but that love and help won’t completely stop the forward march of uprooting, displacement, and destruction. Loving and helping is the best we can do. It matters. It’s good and holy. But we can’t heal all the hurt. And if we do, more hurt will just roll in.

That’s the way it is here, here in this place that isn’t (that can’t be) home.

And that would be depressing, too depressing really, if there wasn’t another place, a truer reality, a home that lasts forever, a home rich in love and joy, provision, belonging and peace built on an unwavering foundation. A home inhabited by my Father and by so many people I’ve loved and lost and soon will find again.

The Apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians, “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.”

-

As a kid, a little girl living on the Florida coast, I sang a song at church about a man who built his house on sand and when a storm came through it washed his house away. But then another character entered the song, a man who built his house on a rock. This time, when the storm came through, the house stood firm.

We sang the chorus like the children we were, happy and unable to grasp the fullness of our words, “Build your house upon the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Jesus tells this story of the two houses in Matthew 7, and it’s about the Kingdom of Heaven, about investing there while you’re here. It’s about building on the rock of faith in Christ and ensuring safety, family, and love in the life to come. Jesus promises that the house we build will not fall.

Building that house looks like acting in faith and sometimes acting in faith looks like providing for others what God will provide for us--offering shelter to the stranger, food and water to the hungry and thirsty, love to the lonely--those nests we build from our little sticks. No, the physical things we build here won’t last, but sometimes the provision of physical things is the brick and mortar with which we build on Christ our rock.

This world, on the other hand, the things that matter to it, Jesus says that’s sand. He says of the house built here, “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

You can build a home here on this shifting surf beside these uncertain seas, and see how it fares, but storms like Harvey and Elena, storms like my grandmother’s death, storms like wars in Africa and unexpected heart attacks, those storms remind me (whether I’m in the thick or watching from close by or far away) that what I build here is often impermanent and vulnerable. Storms like the one outside my window remind me to seek higher ground and invest my life in building something sure to last.