She Wore Brown

Brand New Year

There is something about a fresh new year, a clean new slate, new mornings chock-full of new mercies. I am excited about this year. As I eagerly move toward future hope, I am mindful that not all people have the hope that I have. I want them to. I want them to know this hope that lives inside of me is indeed a hope they too can cling to. That it is more real than all these fake alternatives we seem to fill our hopelessness with. I want to stop being so passive about this all-consuming faith God has put within me. So many of us Christians walk around in drudgery, and I can’t really understand it. We have the one thing that is worth holding deeply, closely, and we walk around with it, with Him, this ever-present hope in what appears to be a time of great trouble, as though it were a lie, as though He were a lie. He’s not. This always leaves me questioning if we truly believe what we say we believe. If we did, how could we live so hopelessly, hold Him so loosely, limiting the belief available to others with our own restrictive and permeating unbelief?

Story Time

God also keeps rousing within me this need to share our stories. He keeps reminding me that all of us have a story to tell and that it is darn-near impossible to tell it if we cannot slow down enough to process all of the bits and pieces of it, the pain and joy we carry from the experiences we often share.

I remember telling an older colleague of mine that I wanted to write a book. She laughed and balked, “what would I have to write about.” I was only twenty-four at the time and she was in her sixties. She presumed (perhaps since I had not lived much life) that I must not have a life worth sharing. She missed the truth that regardless of the amount of life we’ve lived, we all have stories to share. Who was she to predetermine whether I had lived little life or had carried burdensome, heavy loads? Was age the only determining factor of a life lived and worthy of being shared? Is it possible all lives have stories to share outside of the dramatization of them all? Can a simple life have just as much to share as a complex one? I believe all stories from all walks of life are worthy of being shared whether they resonate with us or not. Do they not all teach us something of our shared humanity and the sufferings and joys we carry?

My Story

This year I intend to write my story, and not necessarily because I have something riveting to share, but because we all have something we carry, worth sharing. My story is mostly beautiful, but muddied at best. But it’s the heavy-laden, burdensome muddy parts that have waded me through thick waters of doubt, disillusionment, sadness and uncertainty that have brought me through the baptismal waters of new hope.  It is the parts that I ought not share that have opened my tightly closed eyes and fists to the necessity and need to share.

Stop Waiting!

Stop waiting on something, on someone, on somehow…There is a story to be written now. I don’t say that in a carpe diem manner, but with more of a deliberate aim. For too long I have waited to share my story, primarily because of shame, fear, doubt, uncertainty. There are people who over the years have tried to quiet me and my story, but I really think it is due in part because they are part of the shameful bits. Am I to hold quietly and tightly the sins of another to comfort and coddle their indiscretions while I labor with them silently in fear? This is my story, my life played out in rhythms. These key players are but chapters and stanzas in a much more robust masterpiece that God is more fully allowing and orchestrating as it plays out in the fullness of my life. So today, I stop the waiting. Today, I journey with you to say, I will write. Fully write the book that’s been stirring in my heart for years, (“She Wore Brown”.)

Community and Accountability

Will you go there with me? Will you hold me accountable to write it all down? The beauty, the brokenness? In its fullness? So that I can one: stop carrying every weighted, heavy, and blanketed article of heaviness with me like the character, Christian so eagerly does in the Pilgrim’s Progress? And that two: perhaps finally a bit of my brokenness can be a mosaic, pieced-together-healing, of someone else’s broken journey they too often carry as well?

I’ll leave you with this nugget of truth as I journey into the unknown world that is my muddied story,

“…Truth, vulnerability, and courage can make even the most every day, ordinary life tell an extraordinary story.” – Joanna Gaines, The Stories We Tell

May your story too rise up in you in courage, to share and tell the world so that we can drift purposefully toward each other, pieced together in our wounded places in sealants of healing through the power of our shared stories.