Category Archives: grief

the point of the story: how journaling is a healing work

Posted on by August 14, 2023

I looked for a pen but there were none on my desk – none, except for the light blue one which is too pale for journaling, and the .005 drawing pen I have a crush on and am afraid to use up. But Vin keeps a bunch of pens in a mug on the shelf in our room, so I went there and found the motherlode of blue pens: That’s mine, and that one’s mine, and oh yes, that one’s mine, too. How did all of these get here?

the point of the story: how journaling is a healing work

When I finished pilfering it, the mug was still full of green pens – his favorite – and some black ones, but he knows I won’t touch black pens unless the end of the world has arrived, or blue pens no longer exist…which might be the same thing.

Someday my great-great-great grandkids will go through all my journals, and they’ll find a ridiculous number of entries including complaints about bad pens, missing pens, or favorite pens running out of ink. Some of those entries start like this:

A quick minute with an unfavored pen, waiting for Reagan to finish up on the potty at bedtime. (In terrible, thick black ink.)

Well, this pen might not work. (Ink fading on the upward strokes.)

Some quick thoughts with an ugly pen – my kingdom for some blue ink – before falling asleep. (There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of men for how I feel about black gel pens.)

Aaand we have a wonderful blue-inked pen! I found it hidden in the buffet drawer.

Other journal entries have remarks like these in the middle:

Wow. That was atrocious handwriting. Partly the pen’s fault – the good ball point is over at my desk. (Black ink should never be used on a particularly emotional day.)

And some entries end like this:

See? Handwriting. I really should find a better pen.

I think I despise this pen for journaling.

Aaand I hate this pen.

Journaling for me is like mental housework – twice this month I only got a short paragraph in before some interruption hit, and then it was almost two weeks before I even touched the journal again. Once I did, I dove in to grasp at all the emotional and spiritual clutter that had accumulated over those weeks to see what would emerge. Like neglecting laundry for weeks at a time, when I finally dug through the piles and straightened things up, I found treasures I thought were lost a long time ago.

Journaling is good for both normal tidying and also the occasional necessary deep cleaning. Writing is a healing work.

I thought that when we started writing full time I’d have more time to journal, but that hasn’t been the case because most days, all my writing time is done at the computer. But other times I end the week with journaling and get to start the next week with journaling, too, and it’s in times like those when I realize the weekend in between sometimes feels no longer than the thin line separating the two entries.

But there’s so much good to be had from sitting down with a good pen and lined pages, to force ourselves to slow our thinking long enough for our fingers to catch up with. It gives us the time we need to draw deeper things out of ourselves that we can’t always access while just typing – or worse, texting.

If those great-great-great grandkids ever go through my journals, they’ll also find that my published books left a lot of things out. Not every behavior was mentioned in Upside Down, and not everything God told me during that period was divulged in Oh My Soul.

And in the book I’m working on now, not every conflict, attack, and catastrophe that occurred during our adoption process and the first few years afterward is detailed out. Partly because it’s not meant to be some dramatic exposé. But mostly it’s to protect the guilty, and the innocent, and the misunderstood…and sometimes those are the same people, but not always.

I wrote a while back about the struggle to tell our story when it overlaps with the stories of others. And now, several months later, I can see that the process of filtering our story has distinct layers. First, pull all the material that might work, then go back through all of that and run it through a finer sieve. Whatever’s left after all the sifting is, so far, what gets to stay. Taking the time to work through that process generates an intuitive sense of what fits and what doesn’t.

The significant stuff that’s left out isn’t eliminated because it had no impact on the story. It’s left out because it’s not the point of the story. And sometimes (often) the things that were meant for harm don’t deserve all the attention the enemy wants them to have.

I couldn’t see it then when we were in the middle of it, but now I can look at the progress with a bigger, broader perspective and see the good that came (and is still coming) from awful circumstances, from walking through a season of darkness and brokenness. And part of the good that comes from it is the maturity and equanimity to see that those harmful issues, circumstances, and people were never the focus of our story, no matter how much they overshadowed it.

Those hard things were just ingredients, or seasoning, that flavored that time of our lives. Their effect was like bay leaves in soup – they influence flavor, but they’re indigestible. We’re not meant to internalize them. So we take them out so no one chokes on them or ingests too much of their influence.

And as I work through this project, that is one of the other ways that writing is healing me.

If these books…represent the new memoir at its best, it’s because they were written with love. They elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness, arriving at a larger truth about families in various stages of brokenness. There’s no self-pity, no whining, no hunger for revenge…We are not victims, they want us to know. We come from a tribe of fallible people, prisoners of our own destructiveness, and we have endured to tell the story without judgment and to get on with our lives.

– William Zinsser, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir

We’re only meant to be an open book to God. Even our spouses can’t be expected to handle it all – and if you want to argue this out with me, first tell me how opening fire with all your unfiltered thoughts and criticisms is working out for you.

the point of our story: how journaling is a healing work

This stack is my current required reading for writing memoir, as opposed to the most recent crappy memoir I read – which I won’t call out here, but you can easily find it if you poke around my Goodreads page. And actually, one of these is a wild card, though it’s a highly recommended one. (I have known such wild cards to be terrible, but not often. See above reference to crappy memoir.)

The truth is that memoir writing, like every other kind of writing, comes in both good and bad varieties. That’s the only standard that matters. Whether the authors of certain notorious recent memoirs ought to have revealed as much as they did, breaking powerful taboos and social covenants, isn’t finally the issue. The issue is: Is it a good book or a bad book?

– William Zinsser, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir

But these other three should be safe – you can’t go wrong with E.B. White and William Zinsser; you’re almost never sorry for reading them. They are writers for writers, who make you want to write.

These are the kind of books you shouldn’t read on your day off because you catch yourself putting notes into your phone for Monday, and those notes turn into sentences and the sentences turn into paragraphs, and a few minutes later you’re like, Oh, screw it. You grab your pen and notebook and start working in earnest.

And if you read Vin’s recent post, you know how dangerous that is. Those weekends, you know, are sometimes as thin as the line between two journal entries, and time for rest and Sabbath is important. So I might be at risk of having my books confiscated for the weekend.

Which, come to think of it…might be how I lost all those blue pens, too.

dark to light: change that does a work in us

Posted on by May 21, 2019

It is officially spring in Alaska: The willow trees erupted in stars, change is everywhere, and Vince is painting the kitchen. Don’t rub it in, though.

The man hates painting, but the jagged four-foot long tear in the sheetrock from last winter’s earthquake necessitated it. The kitchen walls were dark brown, the crack was stark white, and there’s no hiding it without addressing it – it must be mudded, retextured, and repainted.

dark to light: change that does a work in us

I think he’s cute in his painting clothes, with his hat flipped backwards. I also think I’m cute with a screwdriver, taking out the switch covers to help prep, easing my conscience before leaving him with all the real work while I escape upstairs to write.

The kitchen is going from brown to white, from dark to light, but the change is everywhere else, too, a sense of transition that feels like impending birth. We’ve been here before. Different times and circumstances but the same level of stress and uncertainty, and we survived. Thrived, even, and sometimes saw miracles and breakthrough. Other times, we just muddled through. In some ways we’re still muddling, still waiting for the resolution at the end of the story, praying the story ends well.

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging how hard it is. The shifting ground, the earthquake, the trauma – we don’t pretend it was a little breeze when it knocked over trees, and we don’t pretend something was just a little tremor when it shook our foundations. We recognize the threat, and we inspect for damage so that damage can be dealt with.

Just as it is no big deal when we love those who love us back, it is also no big thing to be at peace when life is calm. But it is an entirely different thing to love without return, just as it is also an entirely different thing to feel peace and fight for calm when the world is shaking.

Whatever it is, we know He moves in the midst of it. These uncomfortable seasons bring questions to the surface and draw things out of us, and it’s productive.

No, really. Change does a work in us, as long as we don’t give way to fear.

And isn’t that the hardest part? I don’t think we ever graduate from fighting fear. Every time we up the ante and leave our comfort zone, we just graduate to new phases of fear and new ways to win over it. We feel the knots writhe in our gut over what’s going to happen. We wait for the news, the diagnosis, the prognosis. We wait for anything that’s certain, in the midst of weeks that feel saturated with uncertainty.

Fear, at its root, is often more than just being afraid of an outcome. Often it is fear that we failed – we failed to heal, we failed to fix that thing, we failed to protect that person, we failed to predict the future so that event didn’t occur, we failed to accomplish what we wanted to do.

We lost. Game over.

We failed to be God. And when this is the case, admitting as much means also admitting that maybe, just maybe, we’ve made ourselves into an idol.

And this stupid sheetrock is preaching to me. Listen:

Did the sheetrock fail in the shaking? Yes, and no. It cracked, but held. It wasn’t meant to do the foundation’s job and hold up everything. It was meant to do its own job, and bear the weight it was given, and let any failure be used for good – because change, and even failure, does a work in us when we let it. We go from dark to light, too.

We want perfection, and when we don’t achieve it (because we are, of course, imperfect humans) instead of glorying in what we did reach, we feel the lack and the loss. We feel the distance between where we got to and where we wanted to be.

And the enemy throws it right at us, taking it a step further: Not only did we fail, he hisses, but we are failures. The gap widens. The bad hand seems worse.

He’s a liar, we know. But knowing doesn’t always fix our feelings.

Our feelings are harder to reign in and correct. The only thing that fixes feelings is facing them, and that doesn’t seem like good news at first because we know that behind these Big Feelings are some even Bigger Feelings that we’d rather not admit. (We don’t just paint over the crack; we must also retexture. Gah.) In fact, ignoring those Bigger Feelings is often what allows the lie to creep in and hurt so bad in the first place.

It is the crack in our facade, and there’s no hiding it. It must be dealt with.

Facing these things is hard. So much pain. Ignoring it only allows it to build up for later, the pressure creating strain and damage on souls who were never meant to bear the weight of perfection, and denial, and holding it all in.

I recently read that you have to accelerate your pain to accelerate your progress. And I believe it’s true – one of the ways we accelerate both pain and progress is to face those fears we’d rather ignore, the grief we’d rather stuff, and the failures caused by our own imperfection.

There’s no help for failing. We all fail. None of us are perfect. But we wanted to be. So finally admitting failure is actually healthy, and good, and right – a victory in itself.

If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

– C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

The victory comes the morning after the deep grief of facing it all — the change, the imperfections and uncertainties, and the potential clean-up operation — when you look at yourself in the mirror and see resigned peace. And it hurts. But denial hurts worse, because refusing to acknowledge what is broken denies the healing that needs to seep into our cracked areas.

The consequences and what-ifs were all laid on the table. And instead of folding, you put everything in, because you know that in the end, you win. It is the only way we go from dark to light.

in the fog: what we do when we can’t see where we’re going

Posted on by December 20, 2023

Kavanagh napping. Finn playing sweetly, but he’s loud enough to trigger neighborhood car alarms. Vin and I bossing him. Baby waking up after a refreshing 90-second power nap. Repeat until dinnertime.

And this, at least, has not changed in eighteen years of parenting – only then, it was two different kids who are both now in high school, and we are now old…er. Older. Oldish? Whatever. You get it.

in the fog: what we do when we can't see where we're going

It is a night for an easy dinner after a day of not getting nearly enough done and cringing from loud noises. Leftover pasta, leftover salad; sauté some broccoli to go over the top and give myself something to be proud of. Because somedays feel like nothing to be proud of.

Not enough time for everyone and everything. Heaviness in the chest. A sense of swelling behind the eyes that hints at tears, but no thank you, we don’t want that, we don’t have time for that. In this season, ain’t nobody got time for that.

I know what it is. It feels a little like PMS but it isn’t – it’s spiritual attack threatening to spiral into depression, the barrage of lies that shout failure from the rooftops in every area. Loud noises on the outside spike against the loud thoughts inside. The body hurts, the mind and spirit hurt.

And I can be a slow learner, but now I know the drill when it hits: Do the small things, the necessary things that fight the lies and the feelings and the oversensitive body processes.

Drink a glass of water. Take a dose of vitamin D. Rebuke the lie.

And find something easy to clean.

People sometimes seem surprised at how (relatively) clean our house is in spite of seven kids living here, and usually the credit goes to regular chores and a highly efficient husband. But every once in a while it’s something else entirely.

Every once in a while, the house is clean because the mama almost lost her ever-loving mind but narrowly escaped by taking it out on the kitchen.

Because order on the outside helps bring order to the inside.

And wiping down counters is easy, so much easier than the stressful intangibles that have no end. Clean counters help bring sanity and white space.

I cannot clean everything. Just like I cannot do everything. But I can clean this counter in front of me, and see the difference.

In so many areas, we can believe and hope and trust that what we do matters, but we cannot see it yet and the enemy takes advantage of that.

So doing something that we can see is important. It becomes prayer and prophecy; we see movement and change and impact. A clean counter can represent so much more as we pray.

The edge of the sink is covered in coffee grounds and water droplets. One wipe, and it’s clean. Perfect. Rinse the sponge. Done.

There’s a clear before-and-after here, unlike most of the other work with words, and situations, and people. And my own attitude.

For many of us it’s a season of refining, pressing further than we thought we could go, pushing through pain, taking maturity to the next level. And it hurts, like a muscle being strengthened.

We are refining character and relationships, habits, skills, and communication, for a great plan ahead that we cannot see, praying for rain but not yet seeing the cloud the size of a hand.

He sees what we cannot see – and sometimes, often, He lets us see these things for each other.

A close friend of ours had a surprise party last week. She was blindfolded; she didn’t know where she was going, or when she would arrive. But we knew, and we couldn’t wait for her to get there.

…As Christians, we will always live in tension between what we understand and what remains a mystery….We cannot afford to live only in what we understand because then we don’t grow or progress anymore; we just travel the same familiar roads we have traveled all of our Christian life. It is important that we expose ourselves to impossibilities that force us to have questions that we cannot answer.

– Bill Johnson, The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind

In the deep searching, trusting God when it feels like you have no choice but to trust Him (and is that really trust at all?) we’re pressed into voicing those gut-honest questions – the ones He’s not afraid of, but that we’re usually afraid to ask.

These questions lay us open, vulnerable to legalistic blind spots in our past, and the enemy hisses things like, If you really trusted God, you wouldn’t feel that way/need to ask that question/feel so uncertain. We think that Really Good Christians are supposed to find some kind of bliss in the pressure of not knowing, but that’s only because the enemy is liar.

Fire tests the purity of silver and gold, but the LORD tests the heart.

– Proverbs 17:3, NLT

God knows these seasons are not easy. He’s not mad at us for feeling the fire and asking the hard questions.

He’s not mad at us when we ask repeatedly for the cloud the size of a hand.

He’s right there with the truth – He knows the destination, and these questions are the sweet spot, the brave willingness to stare fears in the face and name them aloud, willing to surrender those fears to Him.

Here’s the root of it: If it really is that bad and our fears come to pass, will we still trust Him? Will we still talk to Him?

Of course we will. There is no one left. He is the only one who knows how to take us where we’re supposed to be going. Regardless of what the weather or the circumstances look like, He is rubbing His hands in anticipation, leaning forward, telling us, Just wait, you’re going to love this. I can’t wait to show you where you’re going.

Those who fear You shall see me and rejoice, because I have hoped in Your word.

– Psalm 119:74

And these curveballs, these situations of unknowing, and what-in-the-world-are-You-doing, prove that surrender is beautiful, and powerful, and victorious, and He knows what we want better than we do. He’s not afraid to give it to us, even when we’re afraid to ask for it or take it.

The unknowing and waiting are a lot like writing. Here too, we usually do not know where we are going:

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way.

….You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Bread crumbs from lunch cover the island. Scoop them into my hand, throw them off the deck for the birds, or maybe the mice, but with four cats I’m not worried. Easy, done. Moving on.

It’s hard to see outside of ourselves from the chaos and stress – it presses in, closing in on us just like the fog around the windows, obscuring mountains, neighbors, and the river of traffic going up and down the highway.

We ask for a cloud the size of a hand, and in perfect time He sends the fog rolling in, pressing us into questions and answers and growth we could not or would not have pursued otherwise. And sometimes in our own density, we don’t recognize that that, too, is an answer.

________________________

This is an excerpt from Work That God Sees .