I haven’t really written for a long time. It feels like my brain is constipated. That will be funnier….well nevermind. That analogy won’t be funnier later, but it might make more sense if you keep reading.

In which I talk a lot about my husband’s butt…but not in the fun way.

A little over two and a half years ago J. had surgery to correct a perianal fistula. In layman’s terms, infection from inside his colon caused a hole to form and, um, burrowed its way out. It was bad. Like, we know our marriage is secure because I have shaved my husband’s butt when he needed it kind of bad. And that was a fairly short fistula that was easily repaired, comparatively speaking. So a couple of months ago when he started complaining of a little pain in that area again, we both knew where it was headed. After a couple of weeks it started to get worse (it didn’t help that we attempted to night wean S. because SLEEP), so on September 13th we went to see Doctor Whatever. (In retrospect, sometimes it is worth waiting for someone who doesn’t always have an appointment open in their schedule…) Dr. Whatever did an exam and found a 1 cm opening on the side of his rectal wall, confirming what we suspected. A fistula was forming, or had formed. We weren’t sure which. Dr. Whatever scheduled J. for a surgical consult and mentioned casually that he should probably see a GI doctor at some point because it seemed like he had “Crohn’s Disease or Something”.

We elected to cancel with the surgeons in favor of finding out if there was an underlying issue before just cutting with abandon through his gluteal muscles.

Through a wise friend we found Doctor Calm Down. He came with the highest recommendations which also meant that he didn’t have an appointment available until end of September. During that time I did a bunch of online research on “Crohn’s Disease or Something” to see if there was anything we could do that would help my husband without the risk of lifelong fecal incontinence. A lot of times the course of treatment for an abscess is trying antibiotics before surgery; the idea behind a fistula and an abscess both is that there is infection trying to find its way out of the body. So sometimes if you clear up the infection, the abscess can heal. J started taking Oil of Wild Oregano supplements (an antibiotic, although Dr. Calm Down did not recognize it as such when we saw him. He said, “I don’t care about that but it probably didn’t hurt”), turmeric tincture, and a soluble fiber supplement. We decided to make his food very easy to digest and eliminate anything that could possibly be a trigger for inflammation in his body. No fruits with peels on or dried fruits, no raw or crunchy vegetables with peels (except carrots), no whole grains, no seeds, no fried food, no spicy food, no cheese or dairy of any kind, no alcohol, very little coffee, no soda, no red meat. Luckily this was a very temporary arrangement, just to see if it would help. Night weaning also went by the wayside. Sounds crazy, right? We didn’t go to many dinner parties during that time.

We didn’t talk a whole lot about it publicly. Because we don’t attend services anywhere, there wasn’t a “prayer chain” or anything like that, though he did end up on one at my parents’ church, I think. I called some friends who I specifically wanted praying for us, and left it at that.

We ended up with a colonoscopy (referred to euphemistically as “the diagnostic procedure” on Facebook) scheduled for October 9th. At that time, when they did the scope, Dr. Calm Down diagnosed my husband with a “completely normal colon.” Not IBS. Not Crohn’s. Not colon cancer (I couldn’t even bring myself to say that during the whole time we were waiting to find out, though it was a possibility). A month after being told he needed surgery and possibly had a serious disease he was, and is, completely fine.

The closest we can figure is that Dr. Whatever drained the abscess enough that it was able to heal because we were treating it with diet and natural remedies. In less than a month, which Dr. Calm Down and all of the nurses working with him found very surprising. At this point, we are still being super careful with food (Thanksgiving, the butteriest day of the year in our family, should be interesting). We’re pretty sure he can’t have dairy, which is ok because S. seems to also have a dairy protein allergy. Now that we’ve cut out dairy the little guy has started to sleep through the night and almost completely resolved a weird diaper rash which our pediatrician misinterpreted as herpes. The cold sore kind, not the sexy kind…still, there’s nothing quite like spending a few days waiting to hear back from the lab about a herpes culture for your two year old–did I mention September was LONG?

In which I am in kind of a weird place, but it’s ok.

Ten years ago Katie would have jumped up and down and proclaimed loudly to everyone who would listen (and at a few people who wouldn’t) that all of this happened because of the goodness of God. Jesus healed my husband because of Romans 8 and because “every good and perfect thing comes from the Father of Lights.”

While I do feel glad (not cancer is, in my experience, better than cancer) unchecked jubilation doesn’t quite fit me right now. It feels wrong, somehow. Not false, just….wrong. I know and love too many people who are still torturously suspended in mid-air. They hang on fiercely even though their hands are cut and bleeding; waiting to see if the threads will be snapped above where they can reach. If I think God is good to me because my life has good things in it, then what is God to them? What about the next time something bad happens to me? What is God to me then?

The other morning, we discussed All Saints Day. It’s where our Unschooling took us naturally from Halloween. Elizabeth took all of her wooden train set people and set them around a platter, then brought it over to tell me it was her decoration for All Saints Day. I said I liked it because the people look lots of different ways and that’s good because a Saint can look like anybody.

She spun it around; we both watched it slow and stop. “Mama, I like it because you can spin it around, and each time it lands on a different person. That’s like All Saints day because when people die, each time it’s a different person too.” Sometimes I am out of my theological depth with that girl. I just wanted to make some pancakes and talk about her Great Aunt Fran.

There is this part of me that is afraid sometimes that the spinning platter is really how it is. We’re all just waiting to find out what God is going to do to us. Ten years ago Katie would put me on the prayer chain for having Serious Doubts.

Ten years ago Katie would be wrong. Not unlike smug new married couples who dole out relationship advice for challenges they have not yet faced. Or when people who don’t have kids yet blithely pass judgment on other people’s children. It’s not intentional, but that doesn’t make it helpful, either. I have reached the place in my marriage where questioning is ok; we’re not afraid of disagreeing sometimes, or of asking each other for some space when we need it. I think the idea that we should only focus on and express good feelings about God is unrealistic in the same way as the idea that a healthy marriage has to be one where no one ever expresses bad feelings. The same could be said of true friendship. If the underlying relationship is strong, then it can and should be able to handle all of our imperfections, quirks, and misgivings. A faith that we’re unwilling or unable to question may be, in reality, no faith at all. 

So I submit that there is a kind of doubt that is truer than some kinds of faith. Whatever is going on, whatever questions I have, I feel a freedom to ask them which I have never really felt before. My friend C. said that once when she was going through a really hard time, she just felt really angry at God and that the thing that got her through it was the idea that God can take it. That idea comes back to me, often when the platter seems to be spinning and I am somehow able to look beyond it.

This season of my life, I think, is about not clinging so much to my ideas about God to the point of saying heartless things to suffering people. True things and false things and true things so wrapped up in Christianese as to be indigestible, disagreeable, and even harmful to most people. Things like, “This is happening to you for a reason.” Even if the suffering person in question is asking things I used to be so sure I had easy answers to. Even if the person in question is me.

I know a lot of people who seem to be going through crises right now. I mean real, life or death (or sometimes even just death) crises. And because so much of how people share information is visual (Facebook and blogs), I’m seeing a very wide range of reactions. Some of them are very lovely and make people’s love and care palpable even through the internet. Some of them make me actually swipe my finger across my phone repeatedly as if I could erase the awful thing they said myself.

I see a lot of my fellow Christians focusing a great deal of energy on the ‘go and tell’ verses in the Bible. And don’t get me wrong. We should definitely do that. But that doesn’t mean it always has to look precisely the way it has looked in the American church for the last few decades. In my own family we tend to also pay attention to the part that says, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect…” (I Peter 3:15). Note: Someone expressing honest doubts and frustrations is not necessarily asking you to to give an answer. Asking usually involves people saying something like, “What do YOU think about that?”

Going through a crisis is confusing. Processing your pain with words is like showing your work on a very complicated equation. So people coming along and scribbling the answers to the equation they are working on all over your paper is, well, unhelpful at best. If I don’t have the relational equity to have discussed God with someone before they are in a crisis, I certainly don’t have the right to bring God up as the Wizard of Oz who will fix all their problems if they just go see him.

Living as a Christian, to me, means living the life of Jesus in the world, all the time. As much as possible. There are a lot of times when this looks quite different from talking about living the life of Jesus in the world. Because telling someone that they need food is not the same as bringing them dinner. If someone has no relationship with God, that means interacting with me can potentially be one way they experience who God is, even if that isn’t how it’s received or understood in the moment. “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:17) If I can only communicate one thing to someone in a crisis, it’s definitely not going to be “God’s in charge of what is happening to you.” It’s going to be, “God cares what is happening to you.” If someone doesn’t believe in God, the closest I can get is, “I care what is happening.” And that is not nothing.

Here are some practical ways I try to communicate that idea:

I don’t elevate my need to say something wise or prescriptive above their need to feel their feelings.

I don’t say something, anything to end their grief-filled words just because I (like many Americans) am completely uncomfortable with grief and other negative and/or vulnerable expressions of emotion.

I give them the space to want to punch God in the throat. Because God can take it.

I try to be careful not to say things that make God sound like someone who should be punched in the throat.

I offer them bacon. Unless they are a vegan. Because bacon is not comforting to vegans.

If peaches are in season, apparently I can several dozen quarts of peaches and pray for them the whole time. Well, at least when this is all over I can bring these over and say, “I spent hours praying for you and keeping my hands busy with these. But that’s probably not what you’re tasting…I added a little extra cinnamon, too…”

I find ways to feel solidarity with them. Sometimes this means preparing their favorite meal and eating it to remind myself of them. Sometimes this means wearing matching socks (I have worn mismatched socks since high school. It’s kind of a thing. Wearing matching socks makes me feel uncomfortable, and is a form of fasting. That may sound weird, but it’s very effective for me).

If I am honored enough to get to share time with them, and I am feeling eloquent, I pray, God, please help me to listen well and to hear what you are saying to them, so I can say it too. Help me not to get in the way of what you are doing with my own limited ideas of what you might be speaking into their life at this moment.

If I am honored enough to get to share time with them, and I am not feeling eloquent, I pray, Dear Jesus. Please help me not to say anything stupid. Amen.

So, Rachel Held Evans posted this about the current state of discourse.

And I really liked it.

Because sometimes, I think we are going about this all wrong.

I spent a lot of time being against things when I was younger. I engaged in the culture war between evangelicalism and, well, almost everyone else, with that particular zeal that can only come from being a teenaged extrovert in the Bible belt who has no clue what other people’s facial expressions mean.

When we go to take on the role of someone else’s conscience we need to have a care. It is so easy to get in the way of the Holy Spirit’s work (Holy Spirit is a fancy Christianese way of saying that God is still in the world with us and is still capable of leading each of us into truth–there’s quite a bit more to it than that, but that will do for now). When we take on the role of Sole Provider of Truth for others, we forget that they can have a direct line to God also. For example, if my neighbor is learning that God is loving and kind, and then I come in and proclaim my limited understanding of truth in her face as though it’s the only thing that matters, I dishonor the image of God in her person, set her back, or even send her off the wrong way if I am not very careful.

I think about it this way:

God created all of us to be one big, beautiful reflection of the Divine nature. But, as the Bible or even the most casual observation tells us, the world is not a perfect place. The world is broken, the reflection shattered. We all carry a shard of truth-reflection inside of us, and it’s beautiful. Sometimes we find others whose edges match with ours for a second, and we can get a little bigger picture of who God is from that. It’s a wonderful thing. And sometimes, when we are not careful, our jagged edges run across our brothers and sisters, cutting them and making it harder for them to glimpse what they were reflecting before we came along. I think that the redemptive work of God is to lovingly fit the whole thing back together, one piece at a time.

We are not always mindful of our jagged edges. There are moments when we are careful; when we are trying very hard. Like this, this, and more personally for me, this. But it is a long process and we need to keep going.Yes, Jesus sometimes gave lifestyle ultimatums. No, I don’t think that means we are required to do so in every situation, especially if we are going to do it without paying close attention to the way in which he did it (I’ll give you a hint: it didn’t involve protest signs or self-righteous internet posts, but it did involve getting rid of all the stone-throwers before having any sort of conversation). Yes, we should seek vigorously after what is true. No, we should not be dismissing every passage we don’t like in the Bible as a failure of interpretation. The thing that’s at issue here for me is not the actual “final” decision about whether or not homosexuality is sinful. I really and truly trust God to be in conversation with individual people about that in a more effective way than anything I could ever write on a sign, or a blog, or my own heart. As we seek to live out the Truth in word and deed we can and should still respect other people’s free will and ability to connect with God directly about their own sin. If we can’t have a conversation with someone while keeping those things in mind, then it’s possible we are not ready to have the conversation at all.

When I was younger, everyone thought I was really brave. People thought this, I am told, because I would say things that no one else would. I was unapologetically and uncompromisingly myself almost every minute of every day. I was unafraid to speak out truth even if it would not be well received.

But is it really brave to walk along the edge of a cliff if you don’t know what falling is? Looking back I would say I was just entirely clueless. I mean really, hopelessly clueless. And not in a cute, Alicia Silverstone sort of way (if you weren’t a teenager in the 90s, nevermind about that reference).

A lot of factors contributed to my learning of Other People’s Feelings. First, my senior year of college I lived with three really amazing girls and at some point they kindly, gently, and lovingly pulled me aside and said, “You know, you’re kind of a jerk sometimes.”

I said, “Really?! I had no idea! Can you help me try not to be one?” They tried. I think it worked sometimes. I made a lot of progress that year. Being married has been a HUGE catalyst for change in many ways, but especially in the Other People’s Feelings area. My husband will say things to me like, “When this person makes this face {example expression}, it means you should be careful. And when they make this face {other example expression}, it means you need to stop talking right away.” Seriously, that man deserves a medal. 

Parenting also helped me realize this, but in a less positive way. If/when you have kids (well, maybe not when YOU have kids…maybe you’ll live in a perfect bubble of non-judgment and sleepful nights. Ahem.), lots of people have lots of feelings about what you do with them. And for some reason, a lot of people are really comfortable sharing all of their feelings with you while you are in the very vulnerable space of learning to be utterly responsible for a tiny human. It’s odd, but it’s a thing.

So I get it. Other people have feelings. But now, the question becomes how to deal with it. At this point I have to figure out how much of other people’s stuff belongs to me. And it’s safe to say that some of it does. I spent the first part of my life thinking none of it did, and there are relationships I missed out on because of that.

And yet, I am simply not able to keep my mouth shut and disengage entirely. There are moments when this does seem tempting; as an extrovert I crave positive interaction and in moments full of negativity I do want to hide from everyone because it feels like I’ll never be able to sort out everyone’s emotions. The hardest and most freeing thing about that statement is that it’s entirely true. I’ll never, ever be able to make everything ok for everyone. I’m not God. And I don’t have to be.

The most confusing thing for me right now is when other people tell me that their feelings belong to me. Sometimes this is partially true. If I’ve been a jerk, for instance, I need to earnestly apologize (thank you, college roommates). But it’s not up to me for them to accept my apology. It’s not my job to do whatever will make someone happy instead of mad at me; especially if it pricks my conscience. I already wrote about that another time. You can read that if you want to. It’s confusing, but it’s work worth doing. Because I want to learn to live at peace (shalom, ‘the way it’s really supposed to be’ kind of peace, not just lack of overt conflict) with myself and with others.

To put it in movie terms: The beginning of my life swirled about me in a lovely way, like The Matrix swirled brilliantly around Keanu Reeves even though he is a terrible actor. But after he was supposed to play something other than a dumb-guy-newly-turned-hero, his lack of talent could no longer be overshadowed and the other movies were terrible. I’m trying to avoid that. I’m looking to be Gandalf, not Neo. Hither by Thy help I’m come. And I hope by Thy good pleasure safely to arrive at home.