Summer Heat and Being Held Together

The summer heat is as intense a sense memory as they come for me. Today it was 94º in New York City, and I’m sure most people hated it, but not me. When I feel intense sweltering heat—the kind that rises up from the pavement and settles on your shoulders and permeates your un-air-conditioned apartment in the late afternoon—it reminds me of all the good things in my childhood. It reminds me of eating watermelon in the front yard with my cousins, burying our faces all the way to the rind. It reminds me of getting in the backseat of my mom’s beat up car after school when it was absolutely baking in there, of coming out of the air conditioned town library into the sun and getting goosebumps from the sudden temperature change. It reminds me of summers at the lake, of afternoon thunderstorms that you could set your watch by, of insanely delicious barbecue and homemade ice cream, it even reminds me of Christmas—because in central Florida, Christmas is as likely to be 90º as anything else. Heat reminds me of home in the truest sense of the word.

I love having four full seasons now that I live in NYC, but somewhere between the end of Winter and the beginning of “Spring” I start to get desperate for the warmth to come back. I get what my dad would call a “bone chill” and I can never seem to warm up no matter how long I stand in a steaming hot shower, drying my skin into a flaking bumpy exoskeleton. Winter starts to feel lonely and Springtime in New York is, simply put, a sham. It’s four more months of winter but with much higher pollen counts. But when the first truly hot day comes bursting through, I instantly feel like I’m at home again, like I’m in my own body and things make sense that didn’t when I was frozen to my core—things like hope, to state it lightly. 

There are some things that I think we never get too far away from, because they run deep in us, they’re part of who we are. Even when they don’t have specific memories attached to them, there are feelings that are anchored in the core of who we are and they can’t be washed away by time or space.

Hugs work like that too. My love language has always been touch, so it’s probably extra true for me but I think it holds true for all of us in a way. My friends always tell me I have “the mom touch”—I’m always scratching backs and squeezing shoulders and running my fingers through someone’s ponytail. (I don’t advise this if you aren’t close with someone—I wouldn’t suggest it with, say, your boss or a stranger.) And when I absent-mindedly love someone this way, they more often than not stop what they’re doing and melt. I see it—where there is stress it dissipates, where there is fear it is calmed, where there is physical tension it fades. The magic of touch, especially when it’s filled with love, is that it breaks down a barrier. 

I can be doing my best impression of a person who is tooooootally fine, someone who has their emotions in check and is fully present in this peaceful moment, tranquil as a sea of glass, “Hello, nice to see you today, what a lovely dress!”—until a good friend gives me a hug. And then suddenly everything I’ve neatly boxed up inside comes bursting out and I have zero control, tears are streaming, my chest is doing that heaving thing it does when I’m strangling on that crying burn in the back of my throat, and I just have no ability to stop.  This isn’t a hypothetical scenario—it happened last Sunday at church. It’s happened plenty of times before.

Because the thing with hugs is that they remind me of something in my depths—they are my first language. They remind me of being held and loved and safe and they make me believe that the body is more connected to the soul than we think. A hug brings to the surface everything I have buried inside. I don’t exactly know why this happens—what human instinct causes this visceral response? My best guess is that when you suddenly feel safe and loved, your subconscious says “Why would I bother expending all the energy to keep these things bottled up?”

But if I’m being honest, there are times when I don’t want to deal with that breakdown of my armor. When my husband and I are in a fight or—much more often—when I am stressed and being simply the worst version of myself, Jared will try to hug me. And I don’t want him to at first, I don’t want him to hold my hand or get too close. I don’t want to break down, to let the ice crack and let him in because I’ve got my thing over here that I have control over, my anger or my stress, and in a way that I understand, that’s working for me. But then, because he knows me and knows I can’t resist a good hug forever, he persists. He hugs me and it breaks down the wall I’ve carefully constructed and the next thing I know, I’m crying. I’m telling the truth about how I feel, I’m letting go of the panic that I wildly cling to as a means of control. And finally I can start accepting that things are terrible and tragic and I’m heartbroken, but also that it might be okay.

I wonder if it’s like that with us and God. Us, holding the Spirit at arms length because we can’t afford a crack in our painstakingly built illusion that everything is okay and we’re fine and we’re all cheerful church folks on a Sunday morning. And God, coming back time and again trying to give us a hug, trying to tell us that it’s okay to be a total mess, ugly crying on our friend’s shoulder in the lobby. God trying to give us a glimpse of what it feels like to be a child and feel safe and loved and warm in the summer heat. 

I want my walls broken like that. I want more hugs and squeezes and pats on the back because they force perspective—they remind me that I am not an island, alone with my thoughts and my agony. God is here and there are people around me who love me and care when I’m hurting, and they will help me carry this overwhelming baggage, even when I pretend I don’t need their help. And I will keep giving hugs out anytime I can, because I want to give someone else the chance to be held together while they fall apart.

                                                                                                                   Love, Precious Flowers

2017: The Year of Small Steps

I've gone through many phases and iterations of "New Year's Resolutions". I've been the Super Enthusiastic Resolution Sharer--you know, the one who posts on Facebook about her incredibly lofty, detailed goals on January 1st. I've been the Vague Goal Setter, the "This is the year of my best self!" Whatever that meant at the time. I've totally been the New Year's Resolutions Are Beneath Me person, the one who says annoying things like "If you want to make a change in your life, you don't need to wait for New Year's Day". 

The common thread throughout all these versions of my New Year's Resolutions (or lack thereof), aside from being very entertaining to those around me I'm sure, is that I never ended up making much of a change. I would attempt to make a strong start at the beginning of the year, but by February I would already have wavered in my resolve. Or I wouldn't make a resolution on January 1st--or any other day of the year. Positive change is really hard for me to master y'all. 

This year I decided to try something different. Instead of one enormous goal for the year, I am making 12 mini-resolutions, each to be carried out over the span of a month. Because who can resist a mini-version of something? Based on the number of purse dogs I see on Instagram, I'd say no one. Hopefully I'll be able to build habits onto one another, but that's not something I'm demanding of myself. I love the idea of creating some huge new habit in my life for an entire year, but if the past 29 years are any evidence, it's unlikely that I currently possess this kind of willpower. 

So, here are my 12 Mini-Resolutions, each one to be done for a month. I've split them into 3 categories for no apparent reason since they definitely all bleed into one another.

Creative Goals: 
Read 5 Books
Write 4 Times a Week
Create Something Every Day
Take a Class

Health Goals:
Daniel Fast
Work Out 4 Times a Week
No Alcohol
No Meat

Best Life Goals:
No TV
Buy Nothing (with the exception of groceries)
Meditate on Scripture Every Day
Give Something Away Every Day

You'll notice that some of these involve taking something out of my routine, while others involve adding something in. Personally, I have always found adding something to my life is more difficult than cutting something out, but I'll keep you all up to date on how each of these goes! So far, here's what I've done:

January - Read 5 Books
I totally didn't hit my goal. Five books shouldn't be that hard to make happen, especially considering I have a 30 minute train commute every morning and evening. I think I severely overestimated how much reading I could get done on the vacation we took in January and severely underestimated how distracted I am on the train every day, which left me with only 3.5 books read over the course of the month. I'm going to try again on this one, maybe the month I cut out TV since clearly I'll need something to fill my time with. 

February - No Alcohol
This is a funny one--when I lived in Florida I rarely drank, maybe once a week. But welcome to NYC where apartments are small so people hang out at bars instead. At one point last year I realized I had enjoyed a social drink every night for a week. I want to cut down on that dramatically this year, so going cold turkey this month was a way to start. It hasn't turned out to be that difficult, I'm sure that's due at least partially to having the flu for a week and then was being in recovery mode for another week. You'll also notice I chose the shortest month for this one. Because #redwine.

The plan for March is No Meat so we'll see how that goes for this farm raised carnivore. I would love to have a community of folks to commiserate with/encourage in our resolutions so please tell me what you've resolved to make happen in 2017 and let me know if you'd like to join me on any of my super adorable mini-resolutions! (See, don't they sound super festive when we call them minis and talk about them like they're puppies? I think so.) 

Love, Precious Flowers
 

Why I Don't Care About Being Right

Let me tell you about my greatest fear come true, something I fought tooth and nail, something that has shattered my worldview and consequently my world.

New York City has changed what I believe. Jared and I moved to the City almost three years ago, and little cracks in my belief started to form. Really, I probably had some of them before we moved—but the longer I have been here the wider those cracks have become until now they are great chasms, swallowing up what I knew to be true. That absolute confidence that I had as a high school kid, temporarily broken in college but then reformed stronger and thicker, like the armor of a medieval knight. My belief was like an exoskeleton that held all the parts of my “self” together. And this city I love smashed it into pieces.

I’m not talking about my faith in God or even my Christianity—although that faith too has been through plenty of questioning and refining, digging through layers of what is authentic truth and what is simply the man-made fabric of my upbringing. I deal with my fair share of doubt, but I haven’t become agnostic or atheist, I haven’t walked away from God. If anything my religious affiliation is more traditional than it was before. I attend a Presbyterian-ish church where we talk about things like Advent and Epiphany, recite liturgies, and take Communion every Sunday. I cling desperately to my Faith because I can't make sense of the world without it.

But I think if Five Years Ago MaryEsther had seen what was in her future, she would have been horrified, or at the very least offended by what was to come. No, I haven’t stopped believing in Truth or Grace or Jesus. But I have stopped believing that I know what those pillars of my existence mean to other people. I’ve stopped believing that I can summon Them at a moments’ notice to tell someone else why they’re wrong. I’ve stopped believing that it’s my job to tell people what right and wrong look like.

It was pretty easy to get the idea growing up where I did, being friends with my friends, going to the college I went to, that there was right and wrong and that “Right” was me and people like me, and “Wrong” was everyone else. Being Right was the lens through which I viewed the world, it was the thing that defined me. And I was confident that being right meant it was my responsibility to point out when other people were wrong. I was on the winning team and I loved it.

I saw the first flaw in this logic in college when I faced down the question of Absolute Truth. Inexplicably this question came bubbling to the surface during a discussion of Don Quixote--he believes with all his heart in the reality he has constructed for himself, and even though it isn't the actual reality, it is still true. I attempted to chat with my professor after class about this matter, the result of which I assume is one of his most horrifying memories to this day—of a 20 year old student losing her grasp on reality in his office, crying hysterically in great sobs, trying to explain why in unintelligible gasps. I still remember the shock and then terror on his face when I started a sentence in a normal state and ended it with mascara rolling down my chin. What a saint. 

That was the first time that a crack in my belief opened up, showing me that despite what I had been told, maybe I didn’t have all the answers--that maybe the giant unfolding story of God reconciling Creation wasn't simple enough to tie up in a bow and carry around in my pocket. But I mended that crack, I covered it over so that I could move on with my life. I continued on with my quiet assumption that there was right and wrong, and that you were on one side of that line or the other and that if you were right it was your job to tell other people. And I continued on being “right”. 

Sure, I sympathized with people who were wrong, they probably didn’t know any better. I was still friends with them, if anything I was looking for those wrong people, tough to find in the circles I ran in, so that I could befriend them and eventually tell them about the right way to do things. I thought that was how you loved your neighbor—reeling them in by acting like you were cool with their choices and then slowly but surely revealing to them your more correct way of doing things. What a jerk. 

Then in the freezing January of 2014, two days after one of the worst blizzards in recent memory, Jared and I moved to the City. You could say a lot of things about this place, but I think one of the first descriptions that comes to my mind is diverse. We moved around a lot when we first got here and every neighborhood we went to had it’s own identity—the Caribbean neighborhood, the Artist neighborhood, the Chinese neighborhood, the New Jersey neighborhood. And then we finally landed in Astoria, our own little slice of Heaven--as diverse as I imagine actual Heaven to be. When you live in a neighborhood filled with Muslim women in hijab, actors flying Pride flags, little old Greek Orthodox men, and everything in between, you very quickly realize that loving your neighbor as yourself--like, your literal neighbors--requires that you see these people, who are all so different, as individuals. You can't pretend that people are an anonymous "other" when they're all at your coffee shop every morning. And loving individuals requires a much more complicated response than "You're wrong, here's the right thing."

No, I haven’t abandoned my faith and all the absolutes that come with it. But what I have abandoned is the idea that I know other people’s reality. That I can size up their lives from afar and say what they’re doing right and wrong, that they should do something differently, and that I have the right to tell them so. That their religion or lack of one is wrong, that their drugs are the wrong drugs, that the people they love are the wrong people. I don’t believe it's my job to tell people they're wrong anymore, because these people are my neighbors now--they always were and I just didn’t know it.  Being a good neighbor isn't getting to know people so that you can tell them what they need to change in their lives. Being a good neighbor is loving people in both practical and spiritual ways, sharing a meal with them, asking where they're from, learning their kids' names. I'm still learning how to love my neighbors, but I definitely know what it means to not love them.

I can see how this change wasn’t only caused by (objectively) the best City in the world. God had been working in my heart for a couple years, and last summer it all broke through the surface in dramatic fashion. One of my very best friends looked me in the face with all this fear and pain in his eyes and told me that he was gay, that he tried to fight it for years, that he was destroyed over it for so long, but that now he was happy and he hoped I could accept him this way. He told me he knew I didn’t think being gay was biblical as a Christian, that I couldn’t reconcile it with my beliefs and so he understood if I didn’t approve of him, if I didn't want to be friends with him anymore. 

I cried big, ugly tears and not because he was gay. I cried because he thought I might not love him if I knew he was gay. Something in the way I lived my life had made one of my best friends ask me if I could still love him now that I knew who he really was. It hurts to think about it even now, more than a year later. I hugged him so many times that weekend. I wept when he dropped me off at the airport. I text him all the time now to tell him how much I love him and ask how his fiancé is and talk about the weather. And I live with the guilt that for years of our friendship he thought that if I knew his his secret, I would not be his best friend anymore. If that is what being Right looks like, I mean it, I want absolutely no part of it. And I don’t think Jesus does either.

What started as a crack in my armor while making friends in my neighborhood turned into a canyon that day. I decided then, I will never again let being “right” make someone I care about think for one moment that I don’t love them, that my God doesn’t love them. I won't let anyone I meet look at me and say "Oh, if that's what Christianity looks like, I don't belong there." I will not let my neighbors think they are unwelcome in my home or my life or my church. 

And I know what you’re thinking if you grew up “right” like I did—I know because for years I said it too. “But what about telling the Truth in love?” {One of a million overused church phrases that have been repeated so often they’ve lost all meaning.} What about sin and isn't it our job to tell people that it's a problem? Trust me, I'm not saying there isn't sin to contend with--it's everywhere, most of all in my own life. That old argument still occasionally creeps back to the surface--if you believe something is right with all your heart, isn’t it Love to tell people about it? Isn't it our job to tell people they are wrong so that they can be right?

But here’s my answer to that. It's actually Jared's answer when I asked him those questions once, but I am stealing it because it's a good answer. After realizing that I live in a city--a world--full of people who live vastly different lives, who believe completely different things, who have experienced rejection and hurt in a million little ways, people who already feel like screw ups for one reason or another, people who are all just trying the best they freaking can, here's what I am going to do. I am going to focus my campaign against sin on the sin in my own life. And if the only Truth I “tell in Love” to my neighbors is the main Truth, the seed of the seed of the Gospel, if I focus all my energy on just showing people this one Truest thing I believe in: that they are the crowning jewel of Creation, that Jesus loves them and sacrificed himself so they could be with Him, and that I love them too--that will be enough. You. Are. Loved. That is the core of the Truth I am called to tell, a Truth overflowing with love and joy and acceptance.

Everything else is just being "right", and I don't care about being right anymore.

                                                                                                                                              Love, Precious Flowers