faith

Raised to Life {a guest post and book giveaway}

August 22, 2018 By Michelle

I was delighted to meet Patrice Gopo last spring at the Festival of Faith and Writing. She introduced her friend, Kate Motaung, in a little gathering celebrating Kate’s book release, and even though I didn’t know Patrice, I was moved and touched by the beautiful words she spoke in honor of her friend.

When I saw that Patrice recently released a book herself, I went out on a limb and messaged her on Instagram if ask if, on the off chance, she would be interested in guest posting over here, because I was really excited to introduce you to her voice and a bit of her story. Lucky us, she said yes! Her writing is at the same time quietly powerful, eloquent and lyrical, and I know you will find her as compelling as I do.

Please welcome Patrice Gopo to the blog today, and be sure to enter a comment at the end of this post for a chance to receive a free copy of her beautiful book, All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way.

Essay by Patrice Gopo

In the nightmare I find my toddler face up in a shallow pool. Her wide eyes haunt me. Her clothes balloon with water. I lean over, yank her out, and hold her lifeless body in my arms. I wake, open-mouthed, to the din of absolute silence.

Now alert in the night, I can split dream from reality. I know my daughter sleeps close by. But I see those vacant eyes. The limp body. The spreading circle of damp on my imagined clothes.

***

I am eleven years old when my pastor dunks me into a baptistery filled with water. Raised to walk in new life, I hear when pulled to the surface. A large towel greets me as I exit, my clothes heavy on my limbs, a puddle forming at my feet. Beneath the soft fabric, my skin feels the cool air, and my body begins to shake.

In the future words gush with great force. Well-intentioned opinions flood my mind and make my lungs burn for breath. Taught as tenets of this faith, I hear instructions about being submissive, respectful, and the keeper of the home. An ancient role, I’m told, assigned from the time the Tigris and Euphrates rushed through Eden.

There are things I will come to regret. The way I shrank myself, the way I silenced my voice, the way I believed that idea to be truth. But I will not regret that moment of immersion.

***

I gave birth to my daughter in a tub of warm water. She slipped from the sac of fluid within me to the birthing pool surrounding me. Below where I crouched and pushed, she could have remained there for seconds, minutes, maybe more, her body attached to a pulsating cord.

Instead, the midwife’s hands sank below the surface, cupped my girl’s wrinkled body, and guided the fresh baby to her mother. Thin skin pressed against my wet chest as I waited for a scream that never came. Just the flutter of a heartbeat and a soft mew.

“The gentle birth,” the midwife said while she drained the tub. “Water babies don’t really cry.”

***

Sometimes I daydream about my girl far in the future when she is big and grown. She stands on the bank of a great river or walks barefoot beside the ocean’s many lapping tongues. Her wide eyes stare into a blurry distance beyond the range of my imagination.

And I think how around her, words can rise. How jagged twists on a faith I have handed her may one day creep close and soak her shoes, her clothes, her being. But my daughter, I dream she floats in the river current, breathes with the ocean’s waves. Her strong arms cut through walls of water in a way even her mother never knew.

Why did I believe for so long? Because I didn’t know there existed a way to stop and still remain.

***

In the bright of morning, after the time for nightmares is over, I hear my toddler’s waking cries. Later we walk past a fountain. Her squeals prod me to stare with her at slim arcs of water splashing into the pool below. I loosen my grip on her hand and watch her touch the slight spray of what she has known since her beginning.

(This post originally appeared in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and is used with permission)

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Patrice Gopo is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. She is the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way, an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. Her book is a Fall 2018 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Please visit patricegopo.com/book to learn more. Facebook: @patricegopowrites; Instagram/Twitter: @patricegopo.

Patrice has graciously offered to give away a copy of her beautiful book, All the Colors We Will See. To be entered to win, simply leave a comment on this post — tell me the best book you’ve read in the last six months.

One name will be randomly drawn on Wednesday, August 29 at 8 p.m. Central Time, and I will notify the winner by email.

Weekend One Word: One

November 12, 2016 By Michelle

I wrote this post several weeks ago for my church’s e-devotional, and I think it’s providential that it was published this past Tuesday, November 8 – election day. I’m re-reading my own words this week, trying to let them soak into my heart so that I may live by them. It probably goes without saying, loving the person who is different from you or believes differently than you do is a lot easier on paper than it is in real life.

one

A few years ago my son Rowan came home from school with a question: “Do we believe in the right God or the wrong God?” he asked me.

Turns out, that’s what a friend had asked him at school, and although he admitted to me that he hadn’t really understood the question at the time, Rowan had answered, “The right God.”

Now, though, he wanted to know the difference between the two. “Who is the wrong God and who is the right God?” he asked me.

I’m not sure what Rowan’s friend had meant by his question. Who was the wrong God?

Was it Mohammed? Krishna? Buddha? The Old Testament God? The God of non-evangelical Christians? The Lutheran God? The Catholic God? The Pentecostal God? The God who accepted gay people? The God who accepted everyone?

Initially the question made me angry, because I assumed the young boy was making a judgment…or at least repeating a judgment he’d heard from his parents or his pastor.

But the more I thought about it, the more my anger turned to sadness and shame when I realized I, too, have made a distinction between the “right God” and the “wrong God.”

I know from my own experience that it’s tempting to define myself and my beliefs against someone else’s. And when I do that, I naturally consider myself on the “right” side of the fence, and a whole bunch of other people — people who don’t believe what I do or practice faith or religion (or politics) in the way I do — on the wrong side.

When I define myself against someone else, that person becomes “the other,” and I become “better than.”

This is not at all what God intends for us.

When he created humanity, God did not envision division and lines of demarcation. He envisioned us as one – different ethnicities, different nations, different languages, different custom and cultures, yes, but one in grace and love, one as children of God.

John described such unity in the Book of Revelation:

“After this I saw a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes and held palm branches in their hands. And they were shouting with a great roar, ‘Salvation comes from our God who sits on the throne and from the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9-10)

John’s vision is of heaven, but we forget, when we read these verses, that heaven starts here on earth. The vision John described so beautifully begins with each one of us.

Instead of drawing lines in the sand to declare who’s in and who’s out, who’s right and who’s wrong, who gets salvation and who doesn’t, it’s our job to live out God’s vision, which is much broader, wider, deeper and more spacious than we could ever imagine.

I Will Repent. I Will Lament. I Will Love.

November 9, 2016 By Michelle

temperance-at-sunset

I messaged my friend Deidra this morning, and I said what I always say when there’s been another shooting of an unarmed black person. I said I was sorry. I asked how her heart is. I said I had no words, only feelings of anger and grief and shame.

The irony was not lost on me. I was reacting to the election of our next President of the United States the same way I react to the killing of an unarmed black man.

Deidra messaged back a little while later. She was okay, she said. She was not surprised. She knew a long time ago that Trump was going to win.

I cried when I heard her say that, even though her voice was light and genuinely free of anger and sorrow (not that she’s taking all this lightly…just that she was not stricken with shock like me). I cried because she had seen what I hadn’t, because as a black woman living in 21st-century America, she has been living in it all along.

I didn’t see it coming, I really didn’t. I skipped into my polling precinct yesterday all light-hearted and excited, wearing my imaginary all-white pantsuit, proud to be casting my vote for the first female president of the United States. And just to be clear, I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton just because she is a woman. I voted for her because even though she is flawed, she is the most experienced presidential candidate I have seen since I have been able to vote.

Let me say straight up, part of the reason I didn’t see it coming is that as a white upper-middle class white woman, I didn’t have to see it. I could stay in my cozy bubble. I could tell myself everything was going to be just fine, that Americans would come through, that we would do the right thing. That Christians who proclaim family values as the utmost of importance would not elect a man who condones the sexual assault of women. That white Americans would stand beside their black, Hispanic, Asian-American, Muslim, disabled, immigrant, refugee, LGBTQ brothers and sisters.

I was wrong. I was living in my cozy, protected, white upper-middle class bubble.

Because here is the truth: white evangelical Christians voted for Trump in high numbers, the highest percentage since 2004. Trump beat Clinton among white women, 53 percent to 43 percent.

White Christians paved the way to the presidency of Donald Trump. That is fact.

So. Where do we go from here? As Deidra said this morning, “Now it’s out in the open.” And that’s true. What I never saw coming is now out in the open, for me and all the rest of us to see.

America, we have a problem.

I’m a take-action kind of person. It comes from my dad, whose mantra is, “Make it happen.” So that’s my instinct right now. Do the work. Get it done. Make it happen. What the work is, what “it” is, I’m not exactly sure. But that’s my instinct.

But I also think there’s something to be said for allowing for a time for grief. I’m still in my pajamas right now as I type this at 10 a.m., which is absolutely unheard of. My bed is still unmade. The dirty dishes are still in the sink.

I am allowing myself the time to sit and think and process and repent and grieve. I’m allowing myself the time to acknowledge what’s happened and my role in it as someone who has had the privilege of living in a cozy bubble these last months (years).

I’m not ready to rally. I’m not ready to “come together” and “God bless America” and “God is in control.” I will be, in due time. Just not yet. I need a couple of hours. I need to lament.

And speaking of lament…I log on to the Pray as You Go app each morning. I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks now, ever since my friend Kris Camealy told me about it, and I love it. It’s run by the Jesuits, which is kind of funny, because it seems in some ways I’m coming full circle back to my Catholic roots. That’s probably a topic for another post on another day.

Most of the daily readings since I’ve started listening these last two weeks have been from the Gospel of Luke (maybe it follows the Lectionary? I don’t even know), but today, the reading was from Ezekiel 47:1, 6-9 and 12. I’m going to include it here in full, because it’s important:

“In my vision, the man brought me back to the entrance of the Temple. There I saw a stream flowing east from beneath the door of the Temple, passing to the right of the altar on its south side. He asked me, ‘Have you been watching, son of man?’ Then he led me back along the riverbank. When I returned, I was surprised by the sight of many trees growing on both sides of the river. Then he said to me, ‘This river flows east through the desert into the valley of the Dead Sea. The waters of this stream will make the salty waters of the Dead Sea fresh and pure. There will be swarms of living things wherever the water of this river flows. Fish will abound in the Dead Sea, for its water will become fresh. Life will flourish wherever this water flows. Fruit trees of all kinds will grow along both sides of the river. The leaves of these trees will never turn brown and fall, and there will always be fruit on their branches. There will be a new crop every month, for they are watered by the river flowing from the Temple. The fruit will be for food and the leaves for healing.”

It’s a beautiful vision, isn’t it? Full of hope, healing, and life. And I believe it. I do. Even in grief and dismay. Even in anger and shame, I believe it.

I believe it for the Kingdom Come, but I also believe it for right now. Because here’s the deal, friends: God is calling us right now, for this time, for such a time as this, to be the living stream – the stream that flows through the desert, the stream that makes the waters of the Dead Sea fresh and pure and full of life.

This is our job. This is our work, not just in Kingdom Come, but right now.

Life will flourish, the stream will flow, fruit will adorn the branches, leaves of healing will flutter in the breeze. God is still and will always be on the move. But we need to do our part as part of the living stream. We have work to do.

I plan to stay on the couch in my pajamas for another hour or so. I need a little more time to grieve and lament and process and be angry.

And then I’m going to get up, get dressed, make my bed, do the dishes, and go for a run. After that I’m going to come home and shower and put on lipstick and pet my dog and sit down at my computer. Later I will make friendly chat with the mailman, and pick up my kids from school, we’ll talk more about the election, and we’ll say grace and have dinner together.

I’m going to do my regular, everyday, ordinary work. I’m going to love my neighbors – the ones who voted for Trump and the ones who voted for Hillary. I’m going to extend grace. I’m going to try my best to love those I consider my enemy. I’m going to try to take the long view. I’m going to do my tiny part in the living stream.

As Mother Teresa said, I will do small things with great love.

And life will flourish where this water flows.

Weekend One Word: Sojourner

April 2, 2016 By Michelle

Sojourner

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry…
For I am but a sojourner with you, a wayfarer,
as all my forebears were… (Psalm 39:12-13)

As you might know from reading this post, I just finished reading Addie Zierman’s new memoir, Night Driving. Addie and I could not have had more different faith journeys. She was raised evangelical and experienced a burning fire for God in her youth – a fire that has since all but dimmed, if not at times been entirely extinguished. I, on the other hand, have bumbled through a lukewarm faith, at times wrestling through long, deep periods of outright unbelief.

Addie had the fire but lost it; I never had the fire, but can’t stop seeking it. Though we began at markedly different places, our paths have intersected.

As we’ve stumbled through our long darknesses, Addie and I have both come to realize something important. She puts it like this:

“Love doesn’t always look like romance and faith doesn’t look like fire and light doesn’t always look like the sun — and this matters.

Jesus is the Light of the world. In him there is no darkness, the Bible says. But there are so many different ways that Light manifests itself. It’s the pinks and oranges of a summer dawn. It’s the full, bright sun glancing off the wave tips of the ocean. The hazy winter starlight. The shivering, waning moon. The falling dusk, still glowing like a promise at the edges of the world.”

In other words, there is no “right” way to have faith. This is no “one” way. Faith ebbs and flows, turning like the seasons — petals, leaves, bare branches, buds. Faith can be bright as the midday sun, soft as dawn, faint as a single pinprick star in a black sky.

We are not in this world for long. We are sojourners – people who stay only temporarily in a place — and wayfarers – people who travel by foot, slowly, and at times, ungracefully, picking our way through the vast wilderness. But we keep walking nonetheless, trusting that God is with us, no matter how brightly, or faintly, our faith lights the path ahead.

That Time I Dreamed about the Pope {or, How I Desire to be Known}

July 30, 2015 By Michelle

We’re just back from my favorite place in the world: the North Shore of Lake Superior, where we have a cabin on the edge of the lake that looks like an ocean. I’ve loved this place ever since my very first trip there with Brad more than 20 years ago.

Up on the North Shore, you can walk through a birch grove and hear nothing but the sound of the wind through the leaves, the call of a chickadee, the crunch of pebbles beneath your hiking boots.

You can underhand toss a smooth-as-butter rock into the glassy lake and watch the ripples expand further and further out until they disappear, blending into the great expanse of water that stretches as far as your eye can see.

You can leap wild and carefree with a yelp that echoes into the cavernous space, a split-second moment of blood-roiling exhilaration before the cold tomb closes over your head and you emerge sputtering and flailing.

You can sit on a boulder, your feet tucked in tight, and watch the water swirl around your fingertips as it burbles toward the thundering falls.

You can dip a paddle into strands of lakeweed wavering like snakes. You can laugh till your sides ache when your mom’s marshmallow erupts into flames and slides into the coals in one goopy glump. You can perch on the rocks and watch as day ebbs into night and the sky and the lake become one.

I love all these things about the North Shore, but on this trip, I realized there’s one thing about our cabin on the edge of Lake Superior that I love most of all:

There’s no wifi. No computer. No Dish, cable or DirectTV. On some days, depending on who knows what, there isn’t even a proper cell phone connection.

At the cabin, I am truly disconnected. For one week out of fifty-two, I let it all go – the likes and comments; the Amazon rankings; the who’s arguing about which issue and which movie star is getting divorced from whom and whose blog post went viral and whose book is coming out when and why did she get an advance copy and I didn’t and I don’t think Kate Middleton should have chosen that hat and maybe I should try to pitch the Huffington Post again and did you hear about Whitney Houston’s daughter and why did I only get 11 shares on that blog post it took me four hours to write and hey I had no idea capri pants aren’t in style anymore.

Gone. Off the radar screen entirely with nary a second thought. It all melts away, and I don’t even notice it’s gone. Until, that is, I recognize what’s slipped into its spot, what’s taken its rightful place in the forefront, in full, crystal-clear focus:

My life.

My people. My place. My real thoughts, emotions and deepest desires.

My real life.

I know, I know these things should always be first; these things should always take priority. I mean, how pathetic, right, that my online life takes precedence over my actual, real, in-the-flesh life? But that’s the honest, ugly truth. It does. Not always, not all the time, not every minute. But often enough. Too often.

“I live my life in widening rings which spread out to cover everything.”

That’s the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I read that line in one of his poems while I was up at the cabin, and it stopped me in my tracks. Because the hard truth is, I don’t always — or even often — live my life in widening rings. When I choose social media, when I choose to let social media dictate my life rather than living and being fully present in my real, actual, in-the-flesh life, I find myself living in an increasingly smaller and smaller space. More often than not, social media and my online life press in on me from all sides and crush the very life and breath out of me.

This, friends, is a quandary. Because as much as I dislike it, as much as I find that social media zaps the life right out of me, it’s an integral part of a writer’s professional life these days. Now, I could be brave like my friend Shawn Smucker, who recently closed his Facebook and Twitter accounts entirely, but frankly, I’m chicken. My platform stinks like giant rotten tomatoes as it is; can I really afford to step off the grid?

Or, here’s another, more difficult question: am I simply offering the platform rationale as an excuse? Is the real truth that I won’t step away from social media because it feeds my need to be known?

While I was on vacation in Minnesota I had a dream that I recalled in intricate detail when I awoke. In the dream, I was in charge of a visit by the Pope (it was not Pope Francis, but Francis’s successor, apparently). When I met the Pope, I extended my hand and introduced myself, and as he shook my hand, the Pope looked at me closely, and then said, I kid you not, “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? You look familiar…Oh! I know! I read your articles in the Journal Star!”

No lie. I dreamed that the Pope recognized me from my articles in the Lincoln Journal Star.

Once I was awake and had stopped dying of laughter, I realized the gravity of this funny-but-not-really-funny dream. It pointed in technicolor clarity to my desire to be known. Recognized. Dare I say, famous.

This, friends, is my be-all and end-all idol: I want to be known and valued.

Now here’s the point where, if I were a good Christian writer, I’d tell you that I am known – known by the One and Only One who matters. But I can’t do that, at least not honestly, because even though I believe and know it in my head, I don’t always believe and truly know it in my heart. And so to go down that road right now in this blog post, with relevant Bible verses and encouraging words, wouldn’t really be truthful or authentic.

Maybe this is where we come back to my struggles with faith. Maybe I haven’t been transformed as much as I’d like to believe. Because the truth is, if I truly believed and knew in my heart that God knows me and loves me and values me, and that’s all that really counts or matters when all is said and done, would I really continue to struggle day in and day out with this idol? Wouldn’t this problem be solved by now if I really believed I am known by God and that being known by him is the only being known that matters?

And how about this: if I don’t always truly believe and know in my heart that I am known by God and that’s all that matters, can I say I really, truly believe in God?

Oh boy. We’ve gotten ourselves down into one big ol’ rabbit hole, haven’t we? And you thought this post was going to be all Minnesota pretty pictures, didn’t you? {yeah, me too – thus the trouble with writing…sometimes it leads you where you don’t expect and where you don’t really want to go}

It seems I’ve been doing this a lot lately: leaving you with more questions than answers, more unsettled than peaceful. I’m sorry about that, I truly am. I guess though, for what it’s worth, questions and unsettledness go hand-in-hand with real life, and maybe even with real faith. At least that’s the way it seems to be for me.

For now, I’ll leave you with that Rilke quote again, because I think there’s something there that’s relevant to all the topics and questions I’ve touched on here: social media, being present, asking questions, wrestling with idolatry, living out faith. Friends, together let’s ask ourselves this; let’s sit with this question a bit today:

Are you living your life in widening rings? And if your answer is no, like it is for me, how might you begin to change that?

faith

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