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On Sunday, my family returned from our week at La Casa de Maria Family Retreat. I’ve written about Family Retreat before, what it means to us and what it could mean to all of you. You can catch up here.

The theme for Family Camp 2014 was Storytellers. We covered a lot of ground in five days. We began with the premise that our stories are all a part of God’s story and worked from there. None of us are excluded, no journey or character is too small, or insignificant. We talked about the stories we love, the ones we tell ourselves to get by and the stories we hide behind. We talked about Love stories we embrace and the ones we’d rather forget. We gathered each day with the premise that listening itself is an act of love. (Thanks Storycorp!)

Though I spoke throughout the week on a variety of topics, my favorite talk, the one closest to my heart, came on Thursday, when we open up the floor to any storyteller who wants to share. In those moments, before I handed off the mic, I was able to explore a theme that has been the focus of much of my journey over the last several months and years: the relationship between Fear and Freedom.

The theme of the day was inspired by Momastery.com. This is their image.

sacred-scared1

The words that follow are the ones I spoke last Thursday at Family Retreat.

“Until Glennon Melton put those two words together, I had no idea they were related, but after I saw it, I wondered how I could have missed it.

Sometimes, the stories that are the most sacred to us, the most holy, the most personal, are the ones we are the most scared to tell. What if someone doesn’t understand, or respect our story? What if they judge us, or treat us differently after we share it? What if our story includes something we did wrong, or that we don’t have a resolution for yet? It can be really scary to tell our story, because we don’t have the answer to those questions.

Trust me when I tell you that it was really scary for many members of our team this week to get up and share their stories. We’ve done some things right, but we’ve also done plenty of things wrong and there were no guarantees on how you would experience it, or react to us after we shared it.

But we chose to be story tellers, because of those two words up there. The parts of our stories that we are the most scared of can only become sacred, or holy, if we share them. If we keep our stories hidden inside us, God can’t use them to bless others. Only by overcoming our fear and sharing our life stories do they become sacred – tools that God uses to bless others and the world. When we share our stories, it also gives others an opportunity to bless us with their love and compassion.

That’s what today is about – sharing our Sacred/Scared stories.

The great Maya Angelou who died last year said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” And I believe it. And I believe the main reason we hold those untold stories inside of us is because we are afraid.

I’ve been told that the most frequent command from God in the Bible is “Fear Not!” I’ve heard it appears well over 100 times. The association I have with the line “Fear not” is from one story in particular. Anybody want to guess which one? THE ANNUNCIATION, of course. So I never thought of “Fear Not!” actually being a command that God wants us to keep. I always thought “Fear Not!” was a command that really only applied because an angel had appeared and scared the heck out of you.

But over the last few years, I’m beginning to learn differently. It isn’t “Fear Not! This super extraterrestrial being who just appeared out of nowhere won’t hurt you!” It’s “Fear Not. I am with you.” And that is a very different thing.

I used to think fear was normal. I used to think fear was a tool God used to keep us in line, to keep us safe, or to keep us from making bad choices. But I don’t think that’s it any more. God has way better tools at God’s disposal than Fear.

Fear keeps us imprisoned; fear paralyzes us. It could be fear of anything – of injury, of judgment, of failure, of sadness, of conflict, of solitude, of rejection. And God tells us over and over again to “Fear Not.”

At one time, I would have been hard-pressed to say what the opposite of fear was. In my mind, the opposite of fear was just being “Not Afraid,” being in your comfort zone.

But now I know that the opposite of Fear is FREEDOM. Freedom to take off the mask. Freedom to be ourselves. Freedom to speak our truth. Freedom to share our story. Freedom to step into our story, the one God has had on offer for us all along.

This week I heard other storytellers say that same thing.

The song and music video, “Try,” was about being free from the fear of how we look without our makeup on and what our culture thinks about female beauty. (Readers, if you have not seen it, take the time to watch it!)

Rachel shared in her story on Tuesday that in her vision of God reaching out to her, the word over the white column was “Freedom.”

While Todd and Amanda were a little afraid they were falling in love and afraid to tell everyone, their story could never blossom into the love affair that changed both of their lives and set them free to write a new chapter.

The theme of Chase’s song “Leave” last night in the talent show was that he needed to be free and Ali needed to let him be free. As a mother, as someone who loved him, she encouraged him over and over to “Kick down the walls of resistance” that were imprisoning him.

I don’t think those are just coincidences. Freedom is the key to any story inspired by God.

Just the other day, I heard Erwin McManus, the founder of the Mosaic church, say that when he’s asked about who will have life after death, he says it’s the people who have life BEFORE death. We do not have life if we are afraid.

Freedom is God’s desire for us. Not freedom to commit sin, to act without consequences, to tell lies, to live our lives however we want, but rather Freedom from the lies we tell ourselves. Freedom from sin which always rears its ugly head when we are living a false story, the one that tells us we are separate from God.

Fear makes us Scared. Freedom allows us to make our lives Sacred.

Twenty-three years ago, when I got pregnant with my daughter Sarah and gave her up for adoption, I was terrified of people finding out. I did everything I could to keep her existence a secret from virtually everyone I knew and for almost a decade, virtually everyone I met. As long as I was scared to tell that story, it was not truly sacred. While I was afraid, I was never free.

And the person I was most afraid of telling that story to was my future husband. The story I was telling myself was that I was damaged goods. I was afraid I was unworthy. When I was 19 years old and pregnant, I was already afraid of my future story. And ironically, or rather, perfectly in God’s way, God set me free from that story when I was seven months pregnant and met Tim. I never had to tell the story again.

The Truth set me free and when I was brave enough to share my story with others, it set others free as well.

When I finally started to share my Sacred/Scared, many girls have come to me pregnant, unsure of what to do, but who look at my story as one of possibility and redemption. But it didn’t start that way. It started with me, sitting in my scared and them, sitting in their scared, with no possibility of a sacred Love to be born.

Today we are asking all of you, the Storytellers who have been among us all week, but who haven’t gotten a chance to share a story with us yet, to come on up and share a story. It might be scary; but I promise you, it can be sacred. It will be a little of both, but we are here, knowing that “Listening is an act of Love,” one that we all want to participate in.

So please, if you have a Sacred/Scared to share, if you feel that little flutter in your chest, please consider sharing your story with us. Today is your day. It doesn’t need to be long; it doesn’t need to life changing. But if you would like to share, we’d like to hear it and be blessed by it.

Thank you.”

Many people got up and shared their Sacred/Scared on that day. It was powerful to watch the transformation in their bodies as they moved from Fear to Freedom. It was powerful to watch everyday people doing God’s work here on earth, embracing the storytellers with unconditional Love and support. I can’t share Thursday’s stories here, because they are not my stories to tell. We can only, ever, tell our own truth and allow others to tell their own, but I will say this:

It does not matter if we are rich or poor, strong or weak, male or female, old or young, gay or straight, black or white. If we look at our stories honestly, we will all find ourselves in the characters Jesus healed and set free with his forgiveness: the lepers, the lame, the woman at the well, the Lazarus in the tomb, and perhaps, most especially, the disciples who abandoned him.

And if we understand that our stories follow the pattern of the Christ, we will also reach out and set others free. It may be by feeding the hungry, comforting the afflicted, lifting up the oppressed, or simply standing in loving acceptance of each other, until such time as our assistance and opinion is desired.

The Scared can only become Sacred if unconditional Love is the primary directive and that is what I love about Family Retreat at La Casa de Maria. For over 40 years, the experience has brought families to greater Love and greater freedom. It has helped them tell better stories. Those stories have changed their lives, homes, communities and the wider world. Family retreat is the light on a hill, the mustard seed that grows, the yeast that changes everything and I, for one, am going back next year.

 

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Hi All

I know it’s been a while since I last posted a blog. It’s not because I haven’t been thinking of you; I think of you every day, but I haven’t been sure what to say. Last month, I had some huge things to get off my chest about being honest and my fear of growing old. And this month, I had some huge things to do, like getting back into a classroom after a 10-year hiatus. I had to remember how to stand up in front of an audience for 3 hours, 2x a week and convince them that something they hate is something worth loving. I have to show them that something that is really hard to do can actually get easier if you work really hard at it. Sounds like an oxymoron and that’s what I feel like up there sometimes – a moron.

As you can imagine, I’m not a typical college professor, who takes herself too seriously. I’m just me, which means I’m silly and irreverent, but somehow underneath it all, educated, informed, intelligent and very good at what I do. While I might not take myself too seriously, I take my job seriously. I want to help young women and men become more proficient writers and better communicators. I want to help them breathe a little easier when they get handed an assignment, no matter what class, or job they’re in.

But transitioning from working at home to working at night has been a little shaky at times. The prep time, the paper grading, the rush hour traffic has put a serious crunch on my time.

It isn’t that I don’t have time to write; it’s that I don’t have the time to think about what to say. For me, this blog is a natural extension of my “thinking” time, my “praying” time, and my “being” time and there is a lot less time for those things. I am still getting up early; I am still spending some quiet moments with G each morning, but the thoughts that usually come from that time are fewer and farther between. My mind is on a writer’s strike. It wants more vacation days.

I was talking to my friend J the other day about not knowing where my life was going. There is a lot going on, but not in any one direction and she said a funny thing to me.

She said,

“If you don’t know where to go, pay attention to where you’re invited.”

Hmmm…

I’d never thought of that before. Where am I being invited? Not parties, of course, but in life. What opportunities are being extended? What is being asked of me? What is being offered?

She suggested I look for patterns, to see where one invitation led to another and another and another. The universe is always evolving, always moving towards something good. We are a part of that evolution somehow. The more we say, “Yes” to invitations, the more we are co-creating.

The tricky part is discerning which invitations are the right ones – the life events we are actually supposed to show up for. Too often, I think we end up crashing someone else’s party.

Deep in our hearts, we know which invitations are the right ones, the ones we truly want to accept, but most us stick with our gut response, trusting the guilt that makes us say, “Yes!” to everyone and everything, or the fear that makes us say, “No!” to even the most beautiful, and transformative opportunities. (For the record, I’m a yes man, while Tim’s a solid no.)

It was with this idea of invitation in mind that I said, “Yes” to teaching English 101 for Vincennes University at Balboa Naval Hospital. My heart wanted to meet and know the enlisted, the veterans and the wounded warriors who would be my students. Tim didn’t really understand it (a lot of work for a little money), but it wasn’t his invitation. It was mine. And though it meant saying no to several other things, it felt like an invitation I couldn’t refuse and didn’t really want to.

I’m looking and listening for invitations every day and when I opened up Facebook this morning, there one was, front and center from my “friend,” Glennon on Momastery. She sends out these amazing invitations, huge, fancy, hand-written ones, the kind that make you feel like if you don’t go, you might be missing the party of the year.

But I need to remember; it’s just an invitation, like any other. It might be right for me, or it might be just right for you, so I thought I’d pass it along, just in case you didn’t get one directly from her. Don’t RSVP yes or no based on guilt, or fear. Check out the link and listen to your heart.

Read Glennon’s fancy, photographic invitation here.

Did your heart start to beat faster when you heard the stories?

Did a face, a smile, a word connect with something deep inside you?

Did you just discover that this is something that really matters to you?

Because that’s what the right invitation does. It gives you an opportunity to participate, to co-create, to bring about something new and good in this world.

And when you do it, God looks around and smiles and says, “This is good.”

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Just as I was sitting down to write this blog, I happened to check Facebook and find a post by one of my favorite bloggers in the world, Glennon Melton, and I almost stopped writing RIGHT THERE, as in RIGHT NOW, as in FOREVER, because Glennon has a way of writing that makes me think, “Why do I even bother? Glennon says everything I want to say, but she says it so much better!” Now, if you go to Glennon’s post from today, you might possibly wonder why I would want to say that and today, I don’t, but there are lots of other times when she does, like here and here.

But then I remembered something that Glennon said last month as she was reading a book by Cheryl Strayed,

Dear God, she’s amazing. And I felt myself start to panic a little. OH MY GOD. SHE’S SAYING ALL THE THINGS I WANT TO SAY, BUT BETTER.  I actually thought about CLOSING her book and NOT reading anymore because my heart was panicking and shriveling a bit.

Sometimes, that’s honestly how I feel when I read Glennon, or Anne Lamott, or Paula D’Arcy, but then they go on and on about grace and abundance and then I breathe deeply, and then G (the Big G upstairs) reminds me that I am enough and that I believe in Love and then I can finally try to write again.

So I’m back and ready to tell you a story about my weekend.

It was a hot weekend here in San Diego, like hot hot, like “Texas-hot,” as my kids like to say. They’ve only been there a handful of times, but boy, do they remember. We are also in the midst of soccer season, which means our family had four games in two days. Tim is the manager of The Lad’s team, so we got to set up goals once, take down goals twice, pay the refs, and turn in the scores. Along with all the other parents, we also got to cheer on the sidelines.

Those sidelines were a mass of brightly-colored umbrellas, beach chairs, water bottles and spray fans. There were canopies and sunshades and baseball hats – anything and everything that could provide some relief for the humanity that was slow-roasting in the heat. A friend of mine turned to me and said, “Surely, there is a blog in here somewhere.” And so I looked around to see what I could see.

I saw kids, and I saw parents. I saw players running, kicking and heading. I saw goalies diving, missing, and saving. I saw coaches coaching, cheering and scolding. I saw it all, but nothing that you wouldn’t expect on any given “Soccer Saturday in the Suburbs,” as Tim likes to call it.

So I kept watching Finn’s game, until I was distracted by a commotion happening behind my chair.

As you can imagine, making shade on a weekend like this is serious business. The fans want to be comfortable, but we also want to provide some protection for our players as well. I’m not talking about the players on the field, who were out competing in the sun; I’m talking about the guys on the sidelines, the subs who were resting up to get into, or back into the game.

These 13 and 14 year old young men WOULD NOT STAY IN THE SHADE and it was comical to watch the parents do everything they could to make them, without actually making them.

When the boys were smaller, keeping them in the shade was an easy thing to do. Someone would bring a pop-up tent and someone else would bring a blanket and the team mom would tell them to sit on it and they would. Job done. But as they got older, they wanted to be up on their feet, standing by their coach, or sitting on a chair, and our job got a little harder, but we could shoo them back under the canopy and there they would stay.

But now these boys are young men and we can’t shoo them anywhere. They stand where they want to stand, where their coach asks them, tells them, or allows them to stand. It is no longer our place to tell them where to stay anymore. Their autonomy certainly doesn’t keep us from wanting to protect, however and that is where it gets comical. Each time the subs would move, a parent would move an umbrella with them. It is no easy task to get an umbrella stake into hard-packed dirt, so a mom, or dad would spend a couple minutes twisting, stomping and pushing the sun-protection into the ground. The players would stay put for about 30 seconds and then move on. Parents would wait a minute or two, hoping the players would realize their mistake and come back to the shade. They rarely did, but if they came back, it was instinctively, or by accident, never by conscious choice. Eventually, another parent would jump up and move the umbrella to the new spot and get it settled and then the boys would move on again. This went on for a good 30 minutes, or so before we finally just gave up and followed them up and down the field, like little rajas, holding the shade over them, because really, WE JUST COULDN’T LET GO.

This was the life lesson I was waiting for.

As parents, we want to protect our children. When they’re small, we know what’s best for them, and we can provide it, whether it’s shade on the soccer field, or restrictions on the television. We put a jacket on them when it’s cold, and sunscreen when it’s hot. But as they get older, we think we know what’s best for them and we struggle to provide it, whether they want it or not. The older they get, the more often they are going to step out of the shade we provide. We can twist and push and stomp all we want, but that doesn’t mean they are going to stay put. Our wisdom and support only serve a purpose when our children choose to stand under it.

I cannot follow my almost-grown children up and down the sidelines of their lives, trying to “protect” them from every element that might sap their strength, or burn them a little bit. (Thank goodness I still have Molly to shoo back under the canopy.) Keara and Finn need to be able to move freely, mix it up, and hear what’s happening on the field. They don’t need to be hampered by their well-intentioned mother, telling them to back up, sit down and take it easy. Champions are made in the full light of sun and I need to be brave enough to let them take their place in it.

P.S. We saw a lot of soccer this weekend and a lot of parents, who took great pains to keep their children cool and hydrated on a hot day. Kudos to you. I am not speaking of any one team, or parent. The only parent I am calling out is myself!