Changing from the Inside Out

January 3, 2017October 2, 20175 Comments

This past year has taught me so much. So much more than I wanted when I asked God to change me from the inside out the last time it was time to resolve to walk better in the new year. My plan was to train for a marathon. Push myself and discover how my body after four pregnancies and four c-sections can do so much more than I once thought it could.

I wanted to read and I wanted to write. I wanted to connect with my husband and make sure I read with each of my four kids, prayed with them, instructed and corrected them faithfully and asked them about their days-each and every day.

And I was able to accomplish some of the above: read pinch more, connect with my husband a tablespoon more and be maybe an ounce more faithful in this role I have called motherhood. I ran a whole lot and actually wrote very little.

But last year was not at all the easy, comfortable, peaceful year I had resolved for myself of loving better, writing more and reading cozy by the fire last time the New Years Ball dropped. It was a year of learning to harness my grief and redefine relationships. And as I’ve poured out my heart in this piece I have decided to only share half of what I learned this past year and follow up in a another piece with the rest.

Grief and relationships. These are my tender places and Brene says,

“When we don’t acknowledge how and where we are tender, we’re more at risk of being hurt.”

Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

Last year the changing from the inside out I asked for actually happened- and not from the comforts of a cozy fire. At times it felt like my very own heart was being ripped out. It’s been an unraveling of what I thought I knew. An unlearning of old patterns. And hopefully so many opportunities to weave new healthier patterns, rooted in who God is and embracing the characteristics of being His daughter instead of patterns rooted in what I thought I should do or what others say I am.

Just when I think I have these tender places all figured out, I feel God calling me back to them, to put off the old and put on the new. To continuously undress and redress.

Then the lion said — but I don’t know if it spoke — ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.

C.S Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader

This year I discovered, if you don’t get to know your grief, look at it in the face, become angry with it, cry about it, ask God why about it, you most likely will never be fully healed.

At the beginning of last year I thought my marathon journey was going to be all about me. All about my fitness goals, all about being a bad-ass. But all those miles around town, on the trail and in my neighborhood were actually opportunities to stare my grief in the face. To wrestle, to find closure, to feel broken and human and to find the peace of God which transcends understanding. Looking like a bad-ass this year was not about medals and PRs but instead finding bad-assery in hurts, tears and anger.

As I ran some, walked some, turned off my headphones in the quietness of the trail I got angry thinking about my mom, why she had cancer for most of my childhood and I became angry about her being gone. I hated cancer as I ran. I cried about how the last time I remember speaking to her was probably over some kind of fight we were having about whether or not I should be allowed to spend the night at someone’s house as a teenager or her last memories of me were finding my cigarettes in my room at thirteen or driving the family minivan through the garage and into the dining room while my dad was at work and my mom was receiving chemo at University of Cincinnati Hospital. I hated myself for being such a difficult raging teenager as my mother was breathing her last breaths.

I asked God why I have had to live through having four kids in four years without a parent to call, without someone to listen, without extra hands and without an unconditional-people-who-you-call-about-things-you-can’t-tell-anyone-else- village. I cried about my kids not having Grandma Shelley. I cried because she missed knowing them, she missed knowing my husband. And I know she would have loved my husband and my kids.

All those miles on the trail, I looked my grief in the face. You can walk with God for a decade, have lost someone two decades ago, read good books on grief and still not look grief in the face.

I never had looked my own grief in the face before. I had never taken the time to be mad and sad, frustrated, disappointed. Those are all nasty feelings and for so long I just wanted to push them down rather than feel them. Picking up my boot straps and burying my hurts was so much easier than learning about this tender place. I put band aids on gunshot wounds and for so long I let myself walk in a false sense of peace, not rooted in anything accept what I thought it looked like to be strong and carry on.

My false sense of peace was a breeding ground for insecurity, false hope, cynicism and a whole lot of feeling sorry for myself.

But in taking hold of my grief, learning how and where I am tender, unraveling my yucky strings, I found the comfort of a God who knows suffering.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

Psalm 147:3

I have found thankfulness. To see past the hurts and see how much God has provided for me along the way. Even when I didn’t deserve it with the cars I put in the dining room and cigarettes my parents found in my bedroom only to name two safe stories with you.

How I was an outsider who was brought in. How I have the right and privilege to not just to resolve to be better once a year, but the access of a child of God to His new mercies every single morning.

After a long year of training and running in memory of my mother my plan was to culminate the journey with a Race for the Cure 5K. Something I had never done before because I feared I would be a hot mess of tears for 3.2 miles.

But as I walked that race with my husband and my four kids I was not at all the hot mess of tears I had imagined. I felt whole. I felt shalom-peace for a moment.

Shalom: peace, harmony, wholeness, completeness, tranquility

Shalom-peace. On the other side of the hard journey of looking grief in the face I was thankful. That the road has not been cozy or comfortable but as I look around me I can see big hurts, feel sorry for myself, make the emptiness big or I can see a big God, who knows big hurts, who is walking with me in sorrow and be thankful for the places where he has me now.

Asking God to change you from the inside out is a scary thing. But when you lay back and let God do the work in your heart, when He begins pulling the skins off, it can hurt worse than anything you’ve ever felt. But I promise what comes after the hurt is the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. It is freedom. It is peace. It is shalom.

Step Away From The Cookie Dough

June 22, 2016November 1, 20161 Comment

Breathe to reset. Accept that I am at the end of myself. Depend on something Greater than my feelings. And step away from the cookie dough.

I was thirty-five hours in with fifty-two to go of my husband’s work trip when I found myself reaching for the Pillsbury Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough in the blue package. I was going to slice that baby open with a Cutco knife on that clear seam from one end to the other and take a bite, ignoring the warning about consuming raw cookie dough or whatever.

It’s been a while since I found myself crazy-eyed, knife in hand and after cookie dough. In my right mind I know the facts, the logic, the wisdom. Consuming raw cookie dough is bad for your health and I know the tangible reality of the four pant sizes my waistline would grow after indulging in a savory sea of delicious dough thanks to the my now thirty-three year old sloth-like metabolism no matter how many half-marathon medals I have stashed in my nightstand.

God has made me an emotional being. If you have ever crossed my path at all, I can feel your head shaking up and down vigorously right now even before I hit the blue publish button.

As an emotionally wired being it is difficult for me to quiet my emotions and gasp onto that small voice of reason I have in the way back yonder of my head.

But God has been transforming me by His grace and His Spirit to shut down the emotional voices which seem to get me into more moments than one where I find myself crazy-eyed with sharp knives standing over things.

Reason. Oh reason. Reason is not my natural reaction. Reason has taken a decade to begin to hear truth big instead of hearing truth like a distant whisper in the background.

Reason, who has become my dear friend came to the rescue that day. Now it’s not quite yet the sledgehammer version of reason that I need but reason, over time has become more like a gentle prodding q-tip instead of a distant whisper. A gentle reasonable reminder to put down the cookie dough and the knives (thank goodness) and that gentle prodding then lead me to a deep breath.

It was solo parenting week for me while my husband was away. And I didn’t need cookie dough. I didn’t need spoonfuls of deliciousness to cure my impatience in that moment. I needed reason. I needed to step back from that knife and I needed to breathe so I could gasp truth. And grasp Jesus.

I mean I do parent everyday. I’ve solo-parented my one, then two, then three, then four kids at least four weeks out of the year for the last seven years. I’m no spring chicken. I am a pro. My husband was only away for four days. Some ladies solo parent more than four kids for months in a row. Or years. Or a lifetime.

But in my emotion I couldn’t grasp it. In the first hours of my week alone I clung to circumstances which are constantly changing instead of a God who is unchanging.

My emotions saw a small God and a big army of ants around the sink sticking their tongues out at me this morning and they seemed to chant na-na-na-na-na as they marched in line on my counter tops which I wipe down more often than I brush my teeth and wash my face in a single day.

My emotions saw a small God and a big sore throat in my oldest and my gut saying it was strep. So I wrangled four kids to the doctor before breakfast and experienced a new check-in system where I had to type in all our information in (again) into an iPad while my feisty two year old in her Princess Aurora Dress scratched her three older brothers over that toy of twisty wires and colored beads.

My emotions saw my own positive strep test big and a small God.

And then that breath. The breath. The reason. The remembering that life is bigger than this week and what God is teaching me in my own heart is more profound than the strep, the ants, the tantrums and the chaos.

That reminder of what I should do when I find I am at the end of myself. And Jesus is Lord over the every chaos.

Breathe. Accept. Depend.

Even though I parent every day I keep falling into this belief that I can do this whole parenting gig in my own strength. But that is where I find my teeth gnashing and my low voice grunting. That is where I find myself in the lowly place of reaching to consume raw cookie dough from the package like I am still a twelve-year-old girl without the God of the Universe.

Breathe to reset. To inhale the new and exhale the old.

Acceptance. To accept that I am at the end of myself. No matter how well I plan fun, structure meals, keep every countertop clean and every piece of clothing laundered the ants will still come marching. The curveball will always come especially when I feel like I am swinging pretty well. I love each and every little darling that The Lord has given to me.

But for me, parenting is the gift that stretches me. When I’m pulled apart and humbled to realize I can’t do this gig anymore in my own efforts. Left up to me alone, I’d be a raging crazy-eyed lady with a Cutco knife and a tube of Pillsbury Cookie Dough. Acceptance brings me to the gentle but needed reminder that I don’t hold up the world. I desperately need this lesson daily.

I don’t hold up the world and I don’t have to.

Dependence on something Greater. Yes. I am not able. But I know the God who is. I know God is writing this story so I will learn to trust Him more. In the chaos, tantrums, strep tests and taunting ants marching around my sink.

To lay my cookie dough down, breathe and say, okay God. I need you. Even in the mundane moments of motherhood. I sometimes think that God isn’t concerned with the mundane. I forget that he wants me in the monumental and the mundane. That He sees the triumphs, the trials and the times when I feel like I’m going from one mess to another. I forget that God knows every word before it is on my tongue completely. God knows my going out and my lying down. (Psalm 139:1-4)

God is interested in my daily moments and God sees me caring for sick kids and peeling writing children off of the floor. God sees me. (Genesis 16:13) And God simply wants me to trust that He will sustain me and walk with me through it.

In Matthew 11 Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

As a believer in Jesus I have access to a lightened load. I get so caught up in myself and my plans I forget this. I forget that Jesus wants to bear the burdens with me. I forget to depend. I forget I have access to divine intervention though prayer and the power of Christ in me, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:27)

Breathe. Accept. Depend. And put down the knives and the tube of Cookie Dough. I still had fifty-some hours to go at this moment and I desperately needed to try to remember I can’t do this whole parenting gig on my own.

And I still hope and pray in the next fifty-some years of parenting I can keep on remembering this.

Breathe to reset. Accept that I am at the end of myself. Depend on something Greater. And step away from the knives and cookie dough.

God works. He works in the chaos. He changes emotional beings into people who can hear truth.

Thanks be to the Lord over the chaos. Who quiets the turbulent and volcanic voices of emotion and helps the calming voices of truth work in my heart and change the way I live my life.

Chore Monster

May 30, 2016April 28, 2021Leave a comment

My oldest son has been asking for chores and allowance for about a year now. My husband and I have given them little responsibilities here and there. We paid him a quarter a toilet if he would wipe the misses and splatter off the lids when he was three and four. And now as part of our daily lives all four of our kids set the table, pick up the yard, clear their dishes and put their own laundry away.

But we’ve never paid them. My husband and I both have a conviction that chipping in around the house is a responsibility when you are a part of a family. Our kids eat, play, use the bathroom and have clothes laundered in our humble home so it never seemed like not paying them was the end of the world.

However, as these boys grow and summer is upon us we have decided to take the plunge and pay for extra work around the house.

As a teacher in my pre-mom days I have toiled over charts, thought about creating my own with a pocket chart or a laminated one with velcro stickies but I just never landed on something that was just right to track the numerous chores of our three boys and the little lady who will be joining them on the chore train before I can blink. I needed to find something that would grow with us as we grow.

And then I remembered hearing of this marvelous website and app from my son’s first grade teacher.

Friends, I have found the most wonderful tool. Chore Monster has exceeded my expectations today as I’ve added numerous children, almost thirty different chores and nine different rewards, only two of which are actually monetary.

Here is how it works.

I would add all children first. Then when you go to add chores and rewards you can click on “copy chore/reward” for each additional child.

Adding Chores:

When I added chores I selected some from the list but also created a bunch of my own. Chores I expect them to do every day like brushing teeth, making beds, getting dressed, praying at meal time, all of those are worth 5 points each. Other chores like dusting, clearing dishes, sweeping, playing a board game with a sibling, wiping counters and sinks are worth 10 points and I have a few chores worth 25 points: Wiping down toilets, folding towels, reading for 20 minutes, working on four pages of Handwriting Without Tears Workbooks, and writing and illustrating a summer story.

I then selected the box “make this chore with no schedule or due date”. Then chores can always be reoccurring and I don’t have to manage when they are due. As my kids grow this may change but for now we are just getting our feet wet.

Finally, when adding chores I searched google images, this is a built in on the page, to compliment the chores so when my kids view them in the app or on the desktop they all have a visual to match the text. This helps early readers and I think makes it look like more fun!

Adding Rewards:

This was the fun part for me. My kids don’t need a ton of money, a little will go a long way and also be enough to teach them about what things cost as well as enough for them to consider tithing to children’s church from their own wallets.

There are only two monetary rewards on our list. With this site, this can also change as my kids grow.

For rewards I chose, pick what’s for dinner (50 pts), dates with mom or dad (75 pts), pick the family movie night movie (75 pts), stay up 45 minutes past bedtime (100 pts), five dollars in cash or for the iTunes store (250 pts), Reds Game with just Dad or go with one parent and stay at Kings Island until fireworks (300 pts).

The last two are really desirable for my kids but almost free for us because we have season passes to Kings Island and my husband has a clergy pass for the ballgames.

I’m hoping with the different kinds of rewards my kids will find healthy-just-right-for-them positive reinforcement.

I am trying out the point scale this week to see if I may need to up the ante. My oldest child’s chore monster has been active for all of two hours and he has already earned 55 points with his younger brother only ten points behind him with 45 points.

Completing Chores:

As my kids complete chores they can select which chores they completed in an app on the iPads or on my phone as well as on our desktop computer. Each child has their own log in with their name, picture and simple password.

After they log in their chores I have to approve them before they get points. You can change this in the settings when adding chores so chores are automatically approved, it’s completely up to you and your management style.

The site has lots of other fun features like:

-As I approve points, the site gives tickets kids can cash in to watch silly short movies, upgrade monsters and use to spin the wheel at the carnival. We’ve lost at the carnival every time so far and this made my four year old cry.

-You can add bonus points. This was amazing because after my four year old cried I basically gave him his points right back. But also as summer rolls on and can sometimes cause siblings to get on one another’s nerves when I mentioned the bonus point feature to my older kids I said I will only be shelling out bonus points for kindness to others or encouraging words to others from now on.

So here goes my first structured summer with chores. I’m sure the learning curve will be huge and I will probably have a hoarder of points cashing in for 250 dollars at the end of the summer or all my kids cashing in for the mommy and daddy dates at the same time. Please pray for grace along the journey.

And please go check this out now. As you are learning this site along with me this summer don’t forget to comeback and share your thoughts and comments.

Thank you Chore Monster. Go team Parents.

The Not-So-Runner-Girl

April 27, 2016April 27, 2016Leave a comment

Once upon a time I would watch runners from my car and despise them. I know pastor’s wives aren’t supposed to despise others but I’m working on this. I promise. Little by little. I am human and God is working on me. This feeling of yuckiness when I sighted a runner on the road was unsettling and only began to happen as I approached my thirties, before then I don’t think I ever noticed runners on the road at all. But back when I was approaching dirty thirty with three baby boys strapped into their carseats in the back of my minivan, I started to see runners everywhere and I did in fact, despise them.

I knew many people training for half marathons, running 5Ks and jogging just for fun.

I heard their stories and felt something deep down inside of me, which I believed was disgust too but now I recognize was envy. What I was feeling was discontentment in myself and envy. I was envious of what the runners I knew and the runners I saw were able to accomplish, listening intently to their training plans and then in awe of how one could run for two hours straight.

envy: a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck.

I then recognized the intense feelings I had about the runners along the road wasn’t actually disgust either. Overtime, I recognized the yucky feeling for what it really was: resentment, discontentment and envy. These feelings weren’t about those runners at all. The feelings were about me and something stirring in my heart. And overtime, as I saw the runners all over the streets in my town, as I thought about them and as I laid awake at night in my bed, contemplating my own training plans, I found calling. I found longing. I envied the road runners too and I wanted to be like them.

Running was all around me and I was longing to give it a try. I could have continued to sit in my car and watch runners with my calling and longing, crippling me deep down inside or I could do something about that feeling of envy and join them on the road.

That once upon a time was three and a half years ago. Five pairs of running shoes, almost three half-marathons (I am five days away from God-willing, crossing the finish line of my third 13.1) and one pair of knee high compression socks later.

This is a short story about how I found myself on the trail. Not in a Cheryl Strayed kind of way, maybe a distant cousin of a Cheryl Strayed kind of way. My trail is an asphalt one, void of hills, packed with people on Saturday mornings, only miles from my car, with spectacular LTE coverage and I have only seen one house cat, a handful of deer and quite a few squirrels. All of whom wanted nothing to do with me, though all of them, when I saw their movement along the landscape to my left or along the river to my right, they all did give me quite a fright. And the closest I can get to Cheryl Strayed’s Monster, is a thin hydration belt which I clip around my waist.

So I am not nearly as hard-core as Cheryl Strayed but I have found, along my trail that I am a whole lot more hard-core than I thought I was in the first place.

My mother called me Flash during my SAY soccer days. This was something cute she had written on the back of my jersey. She used to say my long legs made me fast. All I recall was my long legs making me clumsy, a character trait of mine which I now embrace and love, but by the time I reached the sixth grade, when the girls started trash talking during scrimmages on the field, I ended up crying like a baby and my Flash jersey was retired forever.

In eighth grade I cheated on the mile run around the track behind the middle school. I only ran three laps around the track instead of the full four. Other girls were lapping me and let’s be honest, I was dying. Cheating seemed better than death to me in that moment.

In high school I waited to take PE until my final semester senior year. I didn’t want to humiliate myself by displaying my lack of athleticism in front of my peers so I put PE off until I could humiliate myself in a class where I was the only senior in a sea of freshman. That semester I let much younger kids whoop me in badminton and crab soccer, which may have been worse on the old ego than actually taking gym with my own peer group.

To receive an A in PE and graduate with the GPA I wanted, I needed to run that mile in eight minutes and thirty seconds or less. At the time I was a seventeen-year-old, pack-a-day smoker. Cheating again crossed my mind on the day of the assesment but Mr. Kalugyer had eyes on me and was counting every lap, cheering me on. I almost hurled and passed out but I squeaked over the finish line that day at eight minutes and twenty something seconds. Most of the freshman probably lapped me that day but I can’t remember because I was literally sick when I finished that run.

Ugh. Now I run three times a week, I haven’t smoked in over eleven years and I would kill to run a mile in eight minutes and twenty something seconds. Curse you metabolism.

Exactly one year and one month after my third son was born, I suffered a miscarriage for the second time and in the wake of that grief is where I turned my envy and longing into action and decided to join those runners on the road.

I had all of my three boys within three years of one another via cesareans and I had gestational diabetes with all of them. I shudder to think about what my BMI was back then but I started the slow journey of finding myself on the trail overweight, barely able to run a mile without stopping and with a background of smoking in my younger years with the cherry on top of cheating on the mile run in middle school.

But I started to run. And I knew I wasn’t very good so I called myself, The Not So Runner Girl.

In January of 2013 I began to train for my first half marathon. Some suggested I should start with a 5K but as someone who cooks thirty plus dinners at a time to hoard in her freezer, the whole idea of easing in and starting small just doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve kind of become a go big or go home kind of lady.

I made it to six very slow run/walk miles that training season. Those six miles took me ninety minutes. Math people have already calculated that I was a FIFTEEN MINUTE mile in 2013. That sounds horrid to me now and I applaud the old not-so-runner-girl in me because it takes so much tenacity to trudge through a painful fifteen minute mile six times over. And I know some of you out there do this and I applaud you and encourage you to keep going.

When nausea began to accompany those long runs during training season I discovered I was pregnant, which was not apart of my plan but with my miscarriage history, I hung up my running shoes that year and never made it to my desired race, The Flying Pig Half Marathon. With a heavy heart I grieved the loss of that race. I am pretty sure it poured that race day. I am actually certain it poured because I stayed home nauseous with our three boys and my husband ran the race instead, without any training at all. True story. Like salt in the wound.

I ran a few times during my fourth pregnancy once I made it though my first trimester. I was certain I was carrying another boy but that summer I learned I was pregnant with my first daughter. I also passed my first glucose tolerance test that fall. The nurse told me she couldn’t be certain but she thought I passed because of all the running I had been doing which for the first time made me feel like what I was doing for my body actually mattered.

When my daughter was four months old I began to train, again, for my first race. I would nurse my daughter in the mornings and head over to the park to meet my church’s women’s running group on Saturdays. I started at two miles and for the next almost six months I faithfully went through the Couch to Half Marathon Training Program. Nursing my infant all the way through it. I knew nothing about running and at times, I felt clueless. Cheryl Strayed talks about these moments on the trail, the times when she felt like a big fat idiot.

That 2014 training season I was running two miles somewhere in between a twelve minute and thirteen minute mile pace. For a month I worked on building up to three miles to run my first 5K and I was dead set on crossing the finish line in under thirty-six minutes. And I did it. I finished that first race in 35:18 at a pace of 11:24. And five months postpartum after my fourth cesarean, this felt like an enormous accomplishment.

I then trained for six weeks with a personal trainer, now friend, and she taught me about eating well, showed me how to properly squat and wrote down a bunch of exercises I could do from the comfort of my own home. I told her I wanted to break through the eleven minute pace that plagued me all summer and at the end of our training I had done it.

I crossed the finish line of The Queen Bee Half Marathon in the fall of 2014. I had been injured almost right up to the race with terrible tendonitis in my ankle. I could barely walk when I saw my dear sorority sister two weeks before the race and she asked me, as close dear friends do, how I thought I could run thirteen miles when I could barely walk around Target. It truly was miraculous but my pain went away before the race and I even ran tape free. My finish time was 2:18:44. The first half of the race I ran at a 9:59 pace and the second half was a tad slower… see below. But my overall pace for that race was 10:36. Not to shabby for a not-so-runner girl.

I fractured my metatarsal during the eighth or ninth mile of my first half marathon in true not-so-runner-girl fashion. I remember the very specific pain, but I had already been powering through what seemed to me to be much greater pain when I was running with tendonitis during the weeks leading up to the race, I thought running with pain was just part of it. I had no clue my foot was fractured until the bruise appeared two days later and I had trouble stepping on the lid release for my trash can with out feeling that pinpointing specific pain in my mid foot.

I was in a boot for six weeks but putting that thirteen point one sticker on my minivan was so worth it and my three boys thought I looked like Darth Vader in my boot so it was clearly a win for everyone.

It was hard for me to come back after that. I ran a few times that winter but it was polar vortex cold and The Flying Pig Half in May was just not more precious to me than windburned cheeks or a frost bitten nose so I set my heart on training again that summer for The Queen Bee Half Repeat.

I was stupid that summer. But not big fat idiot stupid. I was on the verge of feeling like a running diva. I had too much confidence and I was stupid. I didn’t follow a training plan and my go big or go home mentality teetered near insanity. I only ran distance runs that year. Once a week and accompanied by some spinning and body pump in the fall. My shin splints were relentless and when someone from our church saw me trotting around town on my ten mile run he said it took everything inside of him not to scoop me up into his car and drive me home. I recall him using the words, it was painful to watch you.

I also got bronchitis the week before the race and the strong antibiotics my doctor put me on left me hurling over the toilet. I was a hot mess. Everything inside of me wanted to give up on that thirteen point one. But I had paid ninety dollars to do it so I dragged myself out of bed that morning and headed down to the race. I was even late. I didn’t even make it to my pacing group when they started the race, I barely made it to the walkers.

I heaved myself over the finish line at 2:39:30. A 12:11 pace, my slowest race pace ever, shin splints screaming. I told myself after that race, that I would never, ever, ever run a half marathon again and decided if I came in a Not-So-Runner-Girl, I was retiring a Not-So-Runner-Girl as well.

But then just two months later, I felt that longing again. The same longing I had felt before I started the journey. The longing to be on the road, putting one foot in front of the other. And not just a longing to run a half marathon but a longing to run a full twenty-six-point-two mile full marathon, a real deal race. Sometimes I wish my longings would pack up and leave me. Legitimate craziness lives in me. But this year, I have my heart set on running twenty-six-point-two and I think I have it in me to really do it.

And I’m only half way there. In five days I will run The Flying Pig Half Marathon for the first time. The race that started it all three years ago. And then I will go on from there to train, God-willing, for the United States Air Force Full Marathon in Dayton in mid-September.

My last four months of training have been a hot mess, just the same as the training seasons which have come before them. I was in a boot with a stress fracture for most February and some of March (only about five people knew about this) and then bronchitis struck me again, which is how I discovered I now have something called, running induced asthma. In addition to now toting an inhaler around with me when I exercise, my doctor suggested changing my diet, nothing cold to eat or drink and no dairy. For the first time in my life I have a fridge full of almond milk, I didn’t even know almonds could be milked but I purchased a three pack at Costco, so indeed, I guess they can be.

But with all the hot messes I’ve encountered leading up to this race, I somehow feel stronger. Now a little bit closer to my mid-thirties I know I am stronger than I was three years ago and I’m certainly stronger than I was in my twenties. My twenty-year-old self would have quit in the face of adversity and I haven’t. I haven’t quit.

Now, I even long to be out on the trail on Saturdays. I will trade my second cup of coffee with almond milk for it. To feel the morning sun peeking through the canopy of leaves above me and see it’s beauty as it reflects off of the brooks which trickle beneath me. Waving to other runners and hollering out Good Job, singing Dave Matthews lyrics terribly when I can’t see someone within ear shot, and reflecting on how far my determination and hard work has brought me.

I’m a different woman than the one I was when I started the journey. And all I had to do to was be faithful to put one foot in front of the other. Part of me even feels the Not-So-Runner-Girl chapter coming to a close. Even though I began the journey a Not-So-Runner-Girl, I don’t believe this running story is over for me yet. I really can run now. I know about hydration belts, compression socks, how many GU packets I can fit in the pocket of my hydration belt, how to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, how to just push for one more mile. I’m not faster but I’m different. With each run and each mile I find myself saying, thank you for the miles, and thank you for showing me I am so much stronger than I believed I was.

I get weepy just thinking about it.

I’ve shut up the voices which sometimes remind me I used to be a girl who cheated on the mile run and I used to neglect my lungs and my health in my so called glory days.

(You know what Bruce, I think I am just entering my glory days. Thirties are the new glory days.)

I have pushed the boundaries of what I thought I could do on that trail every week. I have pushed the boundaries of who I thought I was. Maybe my mom would be calling me Flash if she was still here. I know she’d be cheering me on.

Cheryl Strayed writes about this turning point I am feeling so beautifully at the end of the fourth part of her book, Wild.

“I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn’t crying because I was happy. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I wasn’t crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and the 9,760 days that had come before them too.

I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long black veil. I didn’t feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn’t feel like a hard-ass Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.”

And as I walk into this third half marathon of mine, I feel healthy, and ready. And I feel tears. It’s so emotional to do something you never thought you could really do. I too am not crying because of happiness or sadness, but I am crying because I feel full. I have really done something, I am truly different. I’m no longer a Not-So-Runner-Girl. I feel her slipping away. I’m leaving her and entering into something else. Walking into this race I feel the exact same way as Cheryl Strayed because of a different journey on a much different trail. Fierce, humble and gathered up inside.

I am thankful for every mile and every single person who has encouraged me along the way.

Unraveling Grief

April 6, 2016April 6, 2016Leave a comment

This very week, nineteen years ago I was riding in the front seat of our silver Town & Country minivan with my father manning the wheel. I stared out the window as we drove down Sycamore Creek Drive, my eyes fixed on the greening grass that streaked alongside the concrete curb.

I was fourteen, six weeks shy of fifteen and my father was about to say something to me in the privacy of that car, a simple sentence which would change me forever. I knew the words were coming. Every adult around me had been locked and loaded with the words for weeks probably bearing the weight of them and waiting for just the right time to delicately let the words leave their lips hoping the words would come out like the gentle drop of a pin instead of like an earth shattering atomic bomb.

I felt the weight of the words before they were even said. I knew they were coming, I was preparing for the earth shattering atomic bomb. As I prepared for the news I rehearsed the best way I knew how. Just like anyone would prepare for an air assault, I toughened up my exterior and pulled up my bootstraps. I was going to face the worst but appear like a strong fortress, absent of emotion, cold, but protected.

As I stared out the window, I heard my father say, “Rach, mom is going to die.”

The words enveloped me. I had prepared for this exact moment and I responded in the best way I knew how. I kept staring out the window and all I could reply was, “I know.” As I stared and attempted to let disengagement consume me I felt warm tears begin to cover my eyes, turning the strong streaking line out my window into a blurry green blob, even mixing up sometimes with the grayness of the curb.

Staring at the green gray blob became too much so I drew my gaze in and I caught my reflection in the window. I saw the tears in my eyes reflected back at me and immediately I remember being overcome with disappointment in myself for not holding it together enough. For not being strong enough. For not preparing well enough emotionally to handle the news. And then the shame flooded in. I knew if I could see my reflection, my father could see it too. I knew he knew I was crying. I didn’t want him to know I was weak nor did I want to appear too emotional.

I felt the responsibly to be strong and brave in the waves of uncertainty and the shattered earth beneath my feet.

So the best I knew how I tried to go back inside my fortress to hide from my pain. I built walls. I hid behind a heavy mask and protected myself with layers of armor.

The armor I hid behind looked different in different seasons. In high school my armor was a tough girl exterior. I don’t think I wore it well but I flirted with rebellion, disengagement, relationships with men, drinking and recreational drugs. Anything I could get my hands on to help me escape my pain, I tried it. But my fixes weren’t fixing. My band-aids weren’t able to hold together the still open wounds underneath the armor and the masks.

I became exhausted from hiding beneath the bad to the bone girl I was trying to be in high school so in college I tried on some new ways to hid my pain from the world. For a season, during my days at Eastern Kentucky University I tried on the armor of busyness. Twenty-two hours a semester, 4.0s, overly-involved, mentor, sorority girl, chair of the committee, changing the world kind of busyness.

I never wanted to be known as the girl with the hard story so I ran from my hard story. Buried it so deep it even became difficult for me to remember my actual mother. I spent so long trying to be strong and burying pain that I lost even the happy pieces of the times I shared with her.

Brene Brown writes in her book, Daring Greatly,

“When we don’t acknowledge how and where we are tender, we’re more at risk of being hurt.”

I had spent so many years hiding from where I was tender that I wasn’t even sure anymore how and where I was tender.

Brown also goes on to write from her own experience,

“Slowly I learned that this shield was too heavy to lug around, and that the only thing it really did was keep me from knowing myself and letting myself be known. The shield required that I stay small and quiet behind it so as not to draw attention to my imperfections and vulnerabilities. It was exhausting.”

From my own experiences in unraveling my grief over the loss of my mother I could not agree more. I spent so many years hiding behind strong personas, I forgot who I really was. I lost myself. And I felt isolated because I never let anyone know the real me. And I didn’t have my mother present to tell me how to snap out of it.

For so many years I hid and then I lost myself. I felt like a balloon, not tethered to anything at all, just floating around.

It has only been in the last five years that I have been able to slowly unravel my misconceptions about my grief. When you are fourteen you think you know everything about the world and about strength but truth is I knew so little about strength, I knew nothing about it at all.

I thought strength and vulnerability were like that greening grass and the hard concrete I saw streaking outside the window on that April morning. Two very different things which before I felt tender I believed would never blur.

But it turns out, today I believe strength and vulnerability are actually a lot like the blurry blob of grass and concrete I saw out my window when I was feeling tender. To see them both blurred together as one thing. That strength requires vulnerability and it takes a whole lot more strength to be vulnerable than it does to pretend that you can just keep marching on and hide beneath armor and masks.

Now I understand that to hide my pain is not strength at all. It is weak, cold and inhuman.

So I have loosened the bootstraps, tried to get rid of my solider boots all together and I am slowly unraveling unhealthy patterns.

I am trying to be more tender. To learn and remember where I am tender.

I am trying to remember my mom. To cry and sometimes shout to myself, “It sucks that my mom is not here.” Sucks is not apart of my regular vocabulary but it seems to fit there for now.

When I let myself remember the emptiness I feel when I think about her it helps me remember that this life is just not the way it is supposed to be and I long for heavenly places where there is no more crying and no more tears.

I try to talk about my mom with my kids because they ask about her.

I try to remember my mom with my brother and sister. Though my vulnerability with them causes tears. I can only share a little and try to remember the blurring vision my tears cause and what I believe that means. Grief is not black and white, or green and gray streaks or little neat steps. I can’t check off the boxes when it comes to my grief.

Grief is jagg-ed and criss cross with both hard edges and smooth shining surfaces. Grief requires a constant unraveling of our hearts.

I try to sit and wait with a hurting heart. I wait because if I try to bandage it on my own, I will never truly heal. I sit and wait on a Good God who sees me while I wait and promises He will bind up the wounds, I only need to wait and be still. (Psalm 147:3)

In the jagg-ed and criss-cross places of grief, I have unraveled enough to know now that it’s okay to lean into uncertainty and earth shattering grounds, to be tender and broken, exposed and known because I don’t have to appear strong at all. That I can delight in the broken and tender places. It is there where I find God glorified. It is there where I see him holding all the threads of myself together. Taking away threads of misconception and binding me up with His promises to me and His truth.

And I’m not all the way redeemed in my grief. I still have so much more unraveling to do. I may have only begun to chip away at the surface. But I have so much more hope. I know there is a real and good God at work in my heart because I never could have been called out from behind the armor on my own. Little by little God is working on me. Making me more aware of where I am tender and helping me see that to grieve is to simply be human.