"What if you let Me have it? | Celebrating My 7th Life Renewal Day
In this, my 35th and a half year of chronological living, we just celebrated our 7th Life Birth Day!
7 years ago, I shrugged and said, "Oh, okay!" when, while trying to plan my 3-month schedule and biannual review, God responded to my query about the spiritual block I was experiencing with a query of Their own: "What if you let Me have it?"
Photo of a growner and prayerfully wiser person holding a child’s hand, and guiding them somewhere great. By mhrezaa.
So I looked at my calendar, my spreadsheet, my notebook spread out before me and thought, “Oh, wow! God wants to organize my calendar for me! How awesome is that? And probably so much easier, right? Think of how much faster God can do this than I can! Because you know—God!”
Completely overwhelmed and honored that God cared this much about my calendar, I shrugged and was like "Okay," assuming that we’d have everything sorted by dinner, and have our life on lock for the next several months, before They showed up to do my work for me again the next quarter.
Insert infinite laughter here. I have and do. in Delirious Black Folk. Any of these will do. Once I stopped crying because I was so shocked by what came next, I haven’t been able to stop laughing—at the absurdity of my (intentional?) ignorance; in joy of fulfillment; and also that God loves me even in all my absurdity. Because wow, am I absurd at times.
What’s genuinely funny is me realizing as I write this that I don’t actually remember what happened with my calendar that day. No clue. Don’t know if I finished it. Don’t know if I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I don’t remember being dissatisfied at the end of that day or trip, so God gave me something that I believed we had accomplished…my calendar.
What I do remember quite clearly is that six months after Shoulder Shrug “Oh, Okay,” I was hired away from my secular job at Ohio CASA to be a minister at Broad St. UMC. Around the time of Shoulder Shrug “Oh Okay,” I had shared with my mentor, friend, and former boss (my Lou!) that I received my call to ordained ministry, and I had told Holy Spirit I was going to let Them figure out how all of that was going to happen, because I didn’t have the slightest idea.
Holy Spirit figured it out. Shocking, right?
Having just been moved from her extension appointment at the low-income housing organization we’d worked at together to be the lead pastor at Broad St., Lou remembered my call when her associate pastor was fully ordained and moved to his own lead pastor appointment at a different church. So she went ahead and called me up from my dwelling in nonprofit land to serve as their minister of mission and ministries.
One year after Shoulder Shrug “Oh, Okay,” I was applying for seminary, because this was part of my agreement with taking the role at the church—that within a year of coming onboard, I would officially declare my candidacy with our United Methodist Church conference, and be planning to enroll in school part-time.
Nineteen months post-Shoulder Shrug “Oh, Okay,” (SSOO) I was approved as a candidate for ordination as a Deacon in the UMC.
Twenty-two months post-SSOO, I had packed up my life and moved halfway across the country to where I had no family and friends, because that’s where my Holy Spirit- (and United Methodist assembly-) approved divinity school exists.
This part of story has thusfar resolved joyfully in that it turns out I do have family here. (My family is massive, so that really shouldn’t have been surprising.) And, oh , it turns out we can make new friends. I remember whining to my Friend-Adopted Big Brothers before I left Ohio, when they told me that I would make new friends, “I don’t want to make new friends! I already have friends! YOU are my friends!” The gift of being a little sister is that they just laugh at you, pat you on the shoulders, and shove you towards where God called you. I made new friends. They’re kind of awesome, too.
And I basically started becoming a whole new person. Well, more of my actual self.
Beautiful (well, yeah) Black woman faithfully contemplating her life because, at this point, what else is we gone do? By Raphael Lovaski
I hated my experience of life at the beginning of divinity school because I was just going to school. I had been the director of important things, and a board co-chair, and basically a professional volunteer, and now I was just supposed to be a student. How would my existence be counted as meaningful and significant (by…those random people over there!) if I wasn’t doing something that seemed important to other people?
And then at some point—because I learned to stop fighting it—I hit this joyful space of receiving that this was exactly the liminal space God created in moving me away from everyone and everything that I knew. Including what I did in order to “matter.”
I not only had to learn to just be, but to learn that I am loved, and to be loved simply because I exist. And that’s just been freaking awesome.
Do you know how amazing it is to go from thinking you have to check off boxes created and measured by you don’t even know who to basically matter, and then have God just sweep in and be like, “Sis, I created you. Erego, you matter. And you’re awesome.” And They instruct you to learn to be still and eat Oreos while you watch Netflix. Because even in this, you are beloved. You more than matter.
And this is how so much of this experience has been. The only thing I reliably and continually know is that I agree that I do, and so will, trust God. And while some parts have sucked rotten eggs to get through (because shedding, molting, and growing pains), even at those times, if I sought understanding of what the experience means for me and how God desires I respond, I understood fairly quickly to what purpose I was in that space. (Being more quickly faithful with the response I get is a different lesson, lol…)
Even the Biggest Stinkies have been like, “I want to dwell in woe-is-me-ness…? But look. at. God. Look at me in God!”
Big Stink-Stink #1: My dismay at encountering folks being a-holes in what are supposed to be ministry spaces has a significant challenge. And then discovering: Sometimes, I become one of the a-holes, trying to “stop” the a-holes. So we need to work on us.
And God loves us all, not just me eating my Oreos, so I’m to also regard us all as mutually beloved, even when I want to just break folks down until they behave like their better human being. (Ahem. I bully bullies. I’ve done it since grade school.) Jesus has informed me that I, personally, am not supposed to do this. It’s not part of my calling. And so it’s not sustainable for me long-term anyways. (They just start acting up again once I’m no longer present to expend my life energy and the focus of our work together to police them. Waste of my time and life energy, on top of me being disobedient with God). So then we’re both misbehaving, to no greater purpose.
So we’re all journeying together in what I believe to be our holy transformative process (hee-eey, John Wesley), at our best and at our (unfortunate) worst. And we don’t just invite and encourage one another to be their greater person—we make sure we’re receiving our own invitation, because we’ve all got one. More than one. (And someday there will be a post about how we engage so this to ensure this is mutual belovedness, and not spiritual bypassing…)
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Big Stink-Stink #2—I didn’t connect with the person I believe is My Person. And. Even before they said, “Oh, I’m good, but thanks, love,” I knew that I was becoming a greater and better person for having loved them, for witnessing how they love. That’s still 100% true.
Because loving them wasn’t and isn’t about having them—because loving isn’t about having—but learning how to receive, be received, live, and give well. And they did and do this so beautifully. Witnessing them live is witnessing the art of love in constant motion and co-creation, and I could talk about it all day…Their light and being is so inspiring and enriching that even initially it was hard to be overwhelmed by sadness or disappointment. I mean, I kind of was overcome with sadness and disappointment for a bit, lol. It hurt. A lot.
And. It turns out that when you genuinely love someone, you don’t have to wake up beside them every morning and be the one to make them coffee or give them back massages or straddle hugs. We can love and honor one another…because we love and honor one another. We simply do it from where and as we are that’s mutually respectful. Loving them is seeing them. And I learned and continue to learn to love better because I did and do. I’ve been thinking for some time that that’s when it’s deeply and truly love.
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The Biggest Stink-Stink: Realizing that my life was much more a catastrophic mess than I’d understood even when I SSOO’d. Survival tactics from childhood abuse and the self-distorting dynamics of white supremacism and classism (internalized oppressions) had left me with such a convoluted understanding of who I truly am. I mostly just knew how to navigate relationships with one another so I was left unbothered, to avoid having punishment inflicted for not being who others thought I should be.
The latter included burning everything around us to the ground if I felt threatened. If I go, and I feel like you started this fire, you’re coming too. I still don’t think this is unfair. It’s just that it’s also self-defeating since I’ve learned—there are many times that we can just leave, and save winds of destruction for the spaces and places that absolutely need destroyed. If I/we can walk away unscathed, and just leave you standing here flicking your lighter, this is probably not that place.
But the best part about this Stink-Stink, no matter how big it is: Now that I know (even though at parts I still would rather not know…seeing the discrepancy between who we desire to be and who we are is hard) I can do something about it.
And I have these cool gifts to support me in that, right? That I got to spend this time learning what love looks like in this incredible human—and wow, now see it is so many people! And I see it in me. Not just wanting to love and knowing what to say so it sounds like our love active—and still feeling a disconnect because I almost never knew what to do. I see love in me now, through me now.
And being Wesleyan means I believe in grace-filled transformative process so—OMG. I get one of those, too! What? This whole journey? All this learning?—part of my process. Look at God being #meta!
Photo of a Black woman enjoying being, because she knows she’s amazing just for having been created. by Austin Wade.
Even for the biggest stinkies, what I got out of the past seven years more than anything is: My Self. I’m pretty certain that’s a giant win. Massive. The biggest. Literally—the most important. And now I need to learn to be faithful in living my Self—to not allow the learning and invitations of the past seven years to just be some series of cute coincidences that taught me a lot that I’m not actually fulfilling.
I need to live on purpose, and love on purpose. No matter what, this is what my entire living points me towards.
So happy Life Renewal Day to me! Seven years ago today I was in arguably the lowest places of my life. Everything I had wished or planned my life would be was in a shambles, or left me feeling empty and purposesless. And I'm a 2w1 on the Enneagram, y'all. Purpose is what we DO. I am a calling and vocation coach, y’all. Purpose is what I DO.
I used to joke that God tricked me, because it took me the first two and half years to realize that when They asked, "What if you let Me have it?" They meant my Entire. Freaking. Life. Honestly, I still don’t know if I was actually that ignorant, that I truly believed it was just about my calendar, or if I didn’t want to know what it fully entailed.
I do know that, had God said, “Hey, I want to take your life and flip it inside out so we can purge the stuff that isn’t you, help you find the stuff that does fulfill you, put you all back together, and in the meantime you have to let me have control while it happens because I love you, and you can’t do this on your own,” I most likely wouldn’t have simply shoulder shrugged and said, “Oh, okay!”
Whatever went down, I am nothing short of thankful that I said my incredibly nonchalant and janky “Yes,” and humbled that God would care enough about me, about my life, about my being to ask if I would let Them do this with and through me.
Even when this walk has been difficult or heartbreaking, it has been transformative, and so I have always been so thankful--Joy-full, lol!--that I said, "Oh, okay!"
Now I say, "Yes," with much more gusto, less hesitation! I stopped pausing, giving side eye, and asking, “What are You gonna do?” about a year ago. Maybe eight months…?
I was and remain so humbled that God thinks enough of me and has gifted me so deeply that They want to renew me and raise that up to speak into and through my life. I believe They want this for all our lives. I want it for my Self now, way fewer questions asked.
Photo a boxer wrapping their hands, getting ready to do the thing. For the record, we personally don’t have to bust other folks’ faces (or own own). We can just be great at listening with and living our life. By Rocco.
If you ever get asked, “What if you let Me have it?” I hope that you say yes. Or shoulder shrug and say, “Oh, okay.” Whatever it takes for you to open to beginning discover the whole of you.
If I’m there with you, and you look at me and ask me what you should do, I will pause and say with great sorrow and great joy for you:
“I hope you say yes. I hope you open to this and receive that this journey you’re about to engage is everything your life needs, that you otherwise wouldn’t and couldn’t know. That so much of who you desire to be and become is on this excursion. Even when, in a moment, it sucks rotten eggs. Because that is a moment, and what you are receiving is the whole of your being and life.”
As for me and my house, Happy Birthday to My Life, which truly began at, “Oh, okay!” I’m heading into Living Adolescence, and so looking forward to learning my gifts and my grace more fully in this world and our community. And just love and love and love. And co-create, nurture, and thrive. I'm excited to see what We do...