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i have lived with death for years now but hardly ever give voice to it because, really, who wants to spend much time with someone who says they ruminate on this a lot? it feels freeing to have a day where i can write on it, a day like ash wednesday where we remember we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

i considered giving up social media for lent and was close to doing it when i thought that maybe, just maybe, the invitation here was to press in a lil deeper to showing up, imperfectly, in an “i am but dust” kind of way. which to me is pretty much a stream of consciousness kind of way where i write out whatever is swirling around my very complicated insides.

SO. i found it ironic how people were sharing “i am giving up for lent” pics. i do relate to that sentiment a lot because, well, i give up every day. not just for lent.

i don’t know how i carry on, how i get up and show my face on zoom and interview people and string words together and watch funny videos and smile in conversations and get excited about new ideas brewing because, y’know, part of me has died. a terrible, ugly death.

the part that thought i was in control of my “destiny”: ripped off like a stinky band-aid. the part that longed to achieve something great and shiny and awesome in the here and now: p**f, gone.

i give up daily. i give up presuming i know what’s coming in life, that i am mistress of my fate, that i can steer my desires and mold the amorphous wisps of my deepest, most cherished dreams into hard, solid, sexy concrete. i give up thinking i know it all.

i give up the life i thought i had for the life i have now: a life that circles ever-warily around death’s trembling tentacles, that peers beyond them to the New Life where hope and flowers bloom and my beloved babies and doggie and grandmas will be.

my heart leaps with joy at the thought. my heart leaps! with! joy!

one short sleep past, we wake eternally
and death shall be no more;
death, thou shalt die.

— john donne

may 10, 2024: the first time i actually felt something that year (besides abject despair). we were about to get into bed when friends pinged us to get out + look up. we ditched our pajamas + threw on our warmest coats. V drove to one of the least light-polluted spaces he could think of: a railroad track. we took our foldable camping chairs out the back of the car, setting them up next to the track on uneven gravel as our eyes greedily drank in the startling pinks, purples, and greens arrayed above us.

in that moment, i found myself outside my grief + pain, filled with an otherworldly sense of awe. i was no longer just me; i was taken up into something larger, a playful canvas of shifting colours ever so subtly changing before me.

maybe that’s what redemption feels like: an undoing. a remaking. space, clarity, beauty all commingled together.

in what feels like an eternity ago, i wrote the words below in 2017 to accompany a creative project. it felt right to share them today too:

— even amidst the suffering, the pain, the despair, the self-loathing, He still cares and loves. He redeems, and He makes new. through His redemptive power and grace, i can create something out of some of the darkest moments of my life - redeeming them too, if you will. i really like how jeremy begbie puts it: “there will be a redeeming of disorder, mirroring God’s redeeming work in Christ, a renewal of that which has been spoiled, a re-ordering of what is distorted.”

may you discover spots of redeeming grace in pervading darkness. may you encounter shades of jaw-dropping wonderment that leave you speechless.

go gently into the weekend, my friends 🤍

It’s been six years since I wrote this reflection. I’m still part of the same life group mentioned in it, and I couldn’t be more grateful for them.

Thanks for sharing my story, YMI 💛🙏🏼

Why Christian Community Matters - YMI Living overseas for the first time in my life was something I mostly experienced with wide-eyed wonder. But beneath the excitement, anxiety and fear kept bubbling up as I searched for a church and a Christian community I could call “home”.