Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

Spiritual Misfit

The Truth of My Shadow Side

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adirondack chair

I had to admit I didn’t believe in God before I could begin to believe in God.

I realize that doesn’t even really make sense. But it’s the truth.

I grew up in the church but had “a hard fall from faith.” That’s usually what I tell people, even now, when I need to give a cursory overview of my spiritual journey. The reality, though, is that I didn’t believe in God for most of my adulthood, perhaps even for much of my childhood.

For a long time – decades — I didn’t admit that to anyone, most especially to myself.

I went through the motions of faith: I went to church and confession. I prayed, sort-of. But all the while I was pretending. I’d erected my fake belief as a façade, like one of those false storefronts in a ramshackle Old West town. Behind that façade was the real me, falling apart slowly, brick by brick.

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Wild in the Hollow…Today I’m over at Amber Haines’ place. Amber has a new book out, a memoir called Wild in the Hollow, which I highly, highly recommend. It’s raw, truthful and beautifully written, and if you love spiritual memoirs like I do, this one is a definite must-read. Come on over to Amber’s place for the rest of my guest post about truth, and while you’re there, introduce yourself to Amber and learn more about her book. 

The Greater Purpose of Your Work

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Earlier this week I met with five ladies who recently read Spiritual Misfit together as their book club selection. We sat around a large table in the back corner of the local Perkins. They bought me a slice of warm apple pie, and we drank decaf coffee, and we laughed; we laughed a whole lot, which, the ladies told me, is something they do often. They shared their favorite parts of the book — the infamous Cheez-It story, the buying-my-first-Bible story — and asked me some questions about the writing process, and the conversation meandered here and there as they shared bits and pieces of their own stories, too. We sat around that table in the back corner of Perkins for nearly two hours, and I tell you what, I could have stayed all night.

When I got home, I flopped onto the couch, kicked off my shoes and told my husband, “I needed that. That’s the part I always forget about.”

Spiritual Misfit sold three copies on Amazon last week. Three copies. I probably don’t need to tell you that’s abyssmal from a sales perspective.

But here’s the flip side, the part of the story I always forget: that piddly little number doesn’t tell the whole story. Not by a long shot. That dot graphed onto a long, plummeting line of diminishing sales doesn’t tell the story of five ladies laughing around a table in the back corner of Perkins. That number doesn’t tell the story of Julie’s copy of Spiritual Misfit, its pages festooned with no fewer than a dozen blue and yellow tabs, or the other Julie’s book,  notes covering the inside back cover in tiny script. She’d read the book twice, she told me.

That plummeting graph on Amazon.com, that weekly sales report, is missing one critical, unplottable part of the story: the greater purpose.

I listened to an interview with the cellist Yo Yo Ma while I ran this morning, and among the many profoundly beautiful statements he made during the show was this observation, about what happens when something goes wrong logistically during a performance:

“Whatever you practice for on the engineering side that fails is all right, because we have a greater purpose. The greater purpose is that we’re communing together, and we want this moment to be really special for all of us. Because otherwise, why bother to have come at all? It’s not about how many people are in the hall. It’s not about proving anything.”

I let that statement ping around the inside of my head for a while as I plodded down the path. I thought about how Yo Yo Ma’s words  relate to my own journey, both as a writer and a human being, and here’s where I ended up:

The “engineering side” of any pursuit – the planning, the practicing, the execution, the expectations, the numbers, the sales, the success — is important, but it’s not the whole story, it’s not the greater purpose. The greater purpose of Yo Yo Ma’s music, and my little book, and the dozens of other creations both large and small each one of us offers with open hands to the universe each day is in the communing, the coming together, that happens as a result.

Most of us don’t ever get to see that part. Yo Yo Ma probably doesn’t see it from his seat under the glaring lights on the stage. I don’t see it from my seat at my desk in the corner of the sunroom. Chances are, you don’t see the greater purpose of your work and your creation either, from wherever you sit right now. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Tuesday night I caught a glimpse of the greater purpose of my work, and it didn’t have anything to do with numbers or with proving anything, just as Yo Yo Ma said. Rather, it had everything to do with five ladies who gather around a table twice a month in the back corner of Perkins cafe.

What My Nudie Kid Taught Me about Surrender and Trust

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I wrote my memoir Spiritual Misfit over a period of two years when my kids were quite young. It was a time in which my spiritual life and my faith grew exponentially, and much of what I learned God taught me through my children and through the hard lessons of parenting. Today I’m sharing one of the more humorous stories from the book (although it wasn’t all that funny in real-time), about how an incident with my son Noah (who was about five at the time) taught me about surrender and trust. This excerpt is from Chapter 10: Surrendering the Fear:

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It was the kind of day in early spring that made you hold your breath in anticipation, a day just warm enough to entice with the barely plausible thought of ice cream. The kids and I sat outside Dairy Queen under the crab apple tree, contentedly licking our soft-serve cones as fragile blossoms dropped like snowflakes onto the asphalt. The air was rich with the scent of recent rain and new green, the concrete bench still so cool it seeped a wintry chill through the seat of my jeans.

Noah had finished his cone in record time and was leaping from one bench to another, while Rowan dripped rivulets of chocolate down his arm and into the crease of his elbow. I had just turned toward him with a paper napkin when Rowan burst out laughing and pointed, rainbow sprinkles falling like confetti from his fingers.

When I looked up, I saw Noah standing atop a bench with his jeans and Bob the Builder briefs wrenched down to his knees. He was waggling his penis in the direction of a mini-van parked at the drive-through, one arm arched above his head like a rodeo porn star. The husband in the driver’s seat was clueless, busy balancing a carton of Blizzards, but his wife was aghast, slack-jawed as she stared at my son.

“Noah! What are you doing?” I screeched. “Pull up your pants right now before a cop drives by and arrests you for indecent exposure!” [I admit, not my very best parental response ever] He froze for a split-second, eyes wide, before yanking his pants up.

We didn’t rehash the incident on the way home. I figured my dramatic reaction had been sufficient to convince Noah that public penis-waggling was inappropriate. A month later, though, as I hunched over the keyboard in our basement office one night, Noah appeared, standing behind me in his dinosaur pjs.

“Am I going to jail?” he blurted, his eyes filling with tears. “Am I going to jail because of Dairy Queen?”

“What in the world are you talking about?” I asked, faintly irritated that it was after nine o’clock and he was still awake and conversing with me. Turned out, of course, he was referring to, as he put it, “When I was nudie at Dairy Queen.” He had mulled over the incident and my rash words each night for a full 28 days before finally gathering the courage to voice his fears.

I explained to Noah that I had overstated the punishment — overreaction, Brad once wryly noted, is my modus operandi. I assured him that the police would not arrest a five-year-old for pulling his pants down at Dairy Queen, and then I apologized, more than once, and hugged him tight.

After he had gone back to bed, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about the incident. I felt horrible and irresponsible for terrifying him. What kind of mother was I, anyway? Wasn’t I supposed to protect my child from the evils of the world, to nurture his fragile psyche rather than single-handedly destroy it? Shivering in the chilly basement that night, I felt overwhelmed, inadequate and vastly unqualified in my role as a parent.

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Noah and Magnolia

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In that moment I realized that Noah’s fragility mirrored my own. His fear and powerlessness illustrated to me how incredibly ill-equipped we are to face on our own whatever the big, mean, scary world tosses our way. And just as Noah turned to me in a moment of desperate hopelessness and fear, I knew that I could and would have to turn to God in the same way. Noah had tried to conquer his fear himself, lying in bed each night sifting through his terror. But in the end he couldn’t do it; he had to unburden himself in the face of what to him was an insurmountable problem. Likewise, in a strange twist of events that night in the basement, I learned that I needed to do the same. When the world threatened to crush me with hopelessness and fear, I needed to turn to God and put my trust in him.

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Sitting in the dark, cold basement that night, I turned the whole ugly mess — all my fears, all my insecurities in parenting — over to God. I realized then that God loves me in spite of my blurting and blundering, in spite of my overreactions and foot-in-the-mouth moments. I realized that God forgives even my worse parenting decisions, and, if I let him, can ease even my worst fears.

Yet I also knew, even in the midst of that unburdening, that surrender and trust wouldn’t ever be easy for me. My very nature battles it. I understood that I would have to repeat this process of surrender and trust again and again, possibly throughout my entire lifetime.

But I also understood that I had a choice. The choice to trust was all mine.

Got Mud? Yeah, Me Too

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Mud Story

She calls my story a “muddy trek for sure,” and I would have to agree. My journey from unbelief to belief is a muddy story indeed, but I think that’s what makes it so real and, in a way, so appealing to others. We’ve all got some mud in our past, yes? We’ve all got some gritty stuff in our history. No one makes it through this life on earth without some bumps and scratches, without some dirt under the fingernails and grass stains on the knees. But here’s the truth, friends — God loves us, no matter what. No matter our mistakes. No matter our past. No matter our mud.

I recently had the absolute pleasure to chat with Jacque Watkins, host of the podcast series Mud Stories. Jacque knew my gritty spiritual background would be a good fit for her series, so she invited me to pull up a chair, get comfortable and chat with her about the good, the bad and the ugly of my spiritual journey.

I hope you’ll join us for this chat. Jacque and I dig into some deep issues in this conversation, but we have a lot of fun too. So pour yourself a cup of tea, cozy into the couch and listen in. I think you will be both entertained and, I hope, blessed.

Click here for a direct link to the podcast, which you can either listen to or download for later.

 

The (unknown) Hazards of Returning Home {I am a Spiritual Misfit Series}

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Wow, wow, wow! This is the last post in the I am a Spiritual Misfit Series, which has been ongoing every Friday (and occasionally on additional days of the week) since Spiritual Misfit was released in April. What a tremendous blessing and delight this series has been. The opportunity to hear such a variety of “misfit” stories has encouraged me in ways I never imagined. I hope this series has encouraged you as well, and has offered comfort, hope and the knowledge that we are never alone on this journey, not matter how “misfitty” we consider ourselves. Thanks for coming along for the ride!  {To catch up or to read additional posts in the I am a Spiritual Misfit series, click here.}Today we hear from Amy Young, who spent more than 18 years in China and has now found herself navigating her spiritual life and her faith back in the States. Amy blogs at The Messy Middle, so be sure to stop by there to say Hi!

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One of the hazards of living overseas is returning to the US and finding yourself critical of a church you once loved. Of course I didn’t hear of this potential pot hole until years into my time in China. By that point I was already ruined for the ordinary, so why not this area too?

Over the more than 18 years I was in China, one of the few constants was the change experienced year-by-year in my church experience.

This did not bode well for me fitting into churches that don’t tend to change much.

My first year, church meant three of us foreigners gathering in my apartment on Sunday morning.

Mark loved singing and brought his guitar. Erin loved singing if there were enough people to hide her voice and since there weren’t, well, our music was a combo of awkward awesomeness or awesome awkwardness. For a sermon series we passed around a small book with insights on the Psalms and took turns talking about the Psalm for the week. To say this was nothing like the way I had experienced church the previous 27 years of my life, would be either  the set-up OR the punch line on a joke told by Jesus to Peter, depending on how uncomfortable the music had been that week.

By the third year (yes, years have now passed), I had a new teammate and our Sunday gathering had grown to two single women, three single men, and two families with a total of five kids. We had folks who were studying three different minority languages in the area, we had English teachers, we had someone working with blind children, we had Americans and Koreans. We had decent music and solid rotating teaching. We had little arms that liked to give big hugs. And we had no-clue what church tradition we each had come from. It never came up. In short, we had a slice of heaven.

Year six I moved from Chengdu, Sichuan to Beijing. At that time there was only one foreign fellowship and it was on the other side of the beast that is Beijing. To get there took more than an hour by bus (and more than an hour to get home, in case you wondered if after a long exhausting Sunday experience we were teleported home… the laws of the universe weren’t bent for us.). It was held in a gigantic auditorium with the capacity to hold several thousand. And it was crowded.

Up-sides included more than 60 countries represented. I never wearied of seeing the women from African regaled in bright colors. The style of worship music was different each week depending on whether it was led by Koreans, Africans, Australians, or Americans. The commute and time commitment are what stick with me all these years. Though glorious, I have a profound sense of exhaustion when I think of that church experience.

Eventually the church outgrew the venue and a branch was set up in a location closer to my side of the 17 million people of Beijing. I started splitting my time between a Chinese church  AND the foreign fellowship plant. My mis-fitting was now in who I was becoming since we met in a part of Beijing dominated by foreign families and young foreign students. As an aging single I didn’t really fit.

I returned to the US a little over a year ago. I am less this than I used to be and more that. I don’t think the this or that matter. Whatever I’d been before I spent two decades outside of the US church, how could I not change? I find myself wanting a crossbred church experience that doesn’t seem to exist and I wonder how did I not miss it before? How did I feel like I belonged?

Eighteen years is long enough for churches to have changed. Styles to have evolved. A generation has been raised up.  I don’t like feeling like a fuddy-duddy on Sunday morning when we stand for half the service for what seems like a music concert after which we straight into a sermon and at the end the pastor says, “Have a great week!” Where’s the sense of history? Where’s the prayer? Why are the blinds closed so I can see the projected trees on the walls instead of looking at actual trees out the window?

But other Sundays as I soak in rich liturgy, various scripture, and pass the peace I leave fussing at the “divine outreach” involving washing dogs for Jesus or helping high schoolers pick a college major. Have you heard of human trafficking? Or the homeless? Or AIDS orphans? Do you see how God is worthy of more than dogs and there might be something more eternal than your major?

Not the thoughts of one who fits neatly into her place in the puzzle.

So I claim the label Spiritual Misfit, reminding myself of the special place Jesus has in his heart for us misfits. Jesus, here I am, fit for nothing but you.

How has the twists and turns of your life made you more a misfit (instead of less)?

AmyYoungAmy Young is mostly done readjusting to messy middle of life in the US after more than 18 years in China. She is an editor and regular contributor to Velvet Ashes, a watering hole for women living overseas. When she first moved to China she knew three Chinese words: hello, thank you and watermelon. Often the only words really needed in life. She is known to jump in without all the facts and blogs regularly at The Messy Middle and tweets as @amyinbj and is the most unbeautiful pinner Pinterest has ever seen (but she’s having fun!).