Believe it or not, I’ve written you several newsletters this past week that I didn’t send, but now that I’ve decided to stop ignoring my own dang elephant in the room, the story is coming, and I’m excited to share it this Thursday. I’m waiting until then because I’ll be with Mr. Titus again at Children’s Hospital for a few days, as we do.
In the meantime, I want you to know I heard you, or at least a lot of you, when you said you’re in a season of rediscovery and restoration. If you’ve struggled recently with remembering who you are anymore, then I swear to you, you’re in a room with a whole bunch of us.
Until Thursday, if you’re up for it, I’d love to hear how you’re doing in a space that’s a little bit more out in the open, which is why I’m reaching out in a thread.
I’m hearing more and more voices of lostness, and before I dive into my own story with you, I’d like to know if and where you’re finding richness in your faith journey. Tell me/us what you’re experiencing that makes you feel tethered not only God but also to yourself!
Share your wisdom or your lamentation. I think we need each other.
Living in a season of rest, feeling unmoored, drifting. Jesus is my anchor. The harder I try to hold anything else the more lost I find myself. Trying to find my words again.
Watching the finches and junkos and titmice on our feeder this morning, wishing I had a camera that would honour their simple brown-grey beauty against the snow. Feeding them small bites of leftover communion bread and thinking about the way we can offer Jesus to everyone, including these small God-formed brothers and sisters with feathers.
Wrestling with Scripture in small circles of folks, all rabbinic-like, and being awed and renewed by the life and hope and questions I find there. Feels a lot like offering communion to the birds, which isn't as pointless or blasphemous as some might say.
Appreciating lovely ordinary poetic daily gifts through aesthetic experiences in a clean meal, big laughs, anchored good habits, lent devotionals, nature, communion with the saints, sitting honestly with my pain, tea, coffee, intimate relationships...
What a beautiful thread this is, and thank you for the email and invitation to conversation. I'm 41, almost 42, and very much in a season of feeling lost and trying to redefine. I stopped working professionally 12 years ago to stay home with my now 3 girls (12, 11 & 7) and while I wouldn't trade the time I had with them its been a confusing season of identity on so many fronts. Partly due to my own relationship with my mother and growing up in a somewhat dysfunctional household (alcohol and depression) I feel "lost" in parenting on a regular basis (even though I KNOW Christ is with me and I'm doing an ok job, sometimes even a great job with His presence by my side. Amen for that!). I've also struggled with my sense of "purpose", particularly on the days when I longed to be pursuing personal dreams (to be a writer), but years were passing me by where I was so entrenched in parenting that I was too exhausted to write. I know this is "normal", but it's not easy...When you grow up in a home where healthy coping skills are not taught, and neither parent passionately pursued life in any way it creates a "worldview" that has to be intentionally overcome...I'm working on it, but its hard!
Actually I'm really struggling in my faith. I quit church in January after many years of being in unhealthy evangelical churches run by male patriarchal narcissistic pastors. It sounds so cliched, I know. So many years of Christians behaving badly and I've sort of lost my hope in the church. I do love Jesus and want to feel close to him, but even that feels distant now. I just don't feel anything. So I am going through the motions of a spiritual formation practice, doing centering prayer, using the BCP, doing what I don't feel. Ever hopeful.
I'm currently reworking the way I see food and exercise and my body, and in the process uncovering all the decisions I've made based on the fact that I thought one of my life goals was to get thinner. So now - having honest talks with myself about my priorities, (surprise! my deepest desire by the time I'm 90 isn't actually to weigh less!) eating what I really want to, moving how and when I really want to, is freeing my mind and time up to live for connection with Jesus and the humans I care about.
I’ve been reading and reading some more. Taking lots of quiet time in the early morning hours and late evening hours for quiet. After hitting a wall in October, and finally reaching out for help on way of therapy. Things began to get a little better- then my dad died and the mask totally came off. I’ve been having to finally deal with some old pain/wounds from almost 30 years ago that I hadn’t dealt with before. But God is so good. This brokenness has enabled me to fully turn to Him and finally accept and believe God the Father- that he truly has been pursuing me and not just tolerating me. I feel like these past months have been and continue to be a period of refinement. Each area of my life has slowly been changing to reveal how numb I’ve been and how good I had become at pretending. No more. I welcome the pain that produces healing rather than the numbness and tuning out that this world is so good at offering. Your book spoke to me on so many levels! Grateful you are writing again!
what tethers me is not the modern gurus, the online places. it's, the the prophets; isaiah, daniel, habakkuk, etc... and the letters, phillipians, collossians, etc, etc, etc, and reading them-not bit by bit but as whole books. not for some wierd end times or self-serving stuff but just for remembering, belonging, seeing things as they really were and finding hope for things as they really are today. have also found myself gravitating to the old stories and dead authors, amy carmichael, nate saint, isobel kuhn, chambers, bonhoeffer, george mueller, etc..-the ones who write the real, who lived imperfect lives yet reveal in their stories the Lover of their soul meeting them powerfully again and again and again.
also lament. praying the psalms, yes, but also spending regular times weeping and wailing before the One who names the stars.
Jesus said if i lose my life i will find it. that He has proven true again and again and again. setting aside the american dream and worship of self-it's a farce and empty promise. there is a loneliness and fellowship of suffering here, but paradoxically there is Life. the disabilities aren't 'grown out of', the addictions aren't quickly conquered, i mean sometimes they are, but with most it's a walking alongside for years and years clinging to hope when hope seems lost.
Letting go of control, outcomes, and responsibility, first as my two daughters were diagnosed with three different painful, chronic illnesses within the last year and, second, as my son is taking longer than I would like to board a plane from Italy and come home. Control is an illusion. One I have practiced for a lifetime. Arranging outcomes and assuming too much responsibility are specialties that have not served me well. Letting these things go has felt unnatural but necessary in walking toward a truer faith.
Dear Amber its so good to hear from you. I first met you when you spoke at our women's conference @ Life Church in St Louis MO. You said many great things but what opened up my wounded soul was one sentence. "Failure to thrive". You shared your story , your heartache and fears. I refused to give in to mine. But that sentence took the cover off. I sobbed and had to leave the auditorium .My son was in his early teens when he began using drugs. By early 20's he was using heroin , meth and whatever he could get. Fast forward to now, I am in a 12 step recovery program at a local church. I also follow a few on Facebook. They support me and my healing process. My son has been to many rehabs , so many that I found ways to live in the present and to appreciate and love him. God walks me through. I writing this in a hurry because I need to get ready for work. Today my son is 90 days sober. I wasn't prepared to live in hope again. Weird right? Somewhere along this walk I prayed, but stopped hoping. I called on my prayer warrior friends to pull me out of that pit. God told to trust him, not the process. We lose our way so fast.
I don't know if we will get to meet again. Keep telling your story. Someone needs to permission to tell theirs. love you !!
Girl. I’m just over here trying to get some laughter and silliness in the midst of the heaviness of it all. Sometimes I forget God is not in a bad mood.
It’s always my inclination to stay close to the pain and what he is teaching me through it. That part is full of meaning and beauty and joy. I feel grateful to have learned that.
Finding myself anchored in the person of Jesus and him alone. We have stepped away from the institution of the church after years of questioning what we are all doing there. The instability of the organization that calls itself church has only strengthened my faith that Jesus is the one who cant be shaken. Jesus said “on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not overcome it.” He meant the body of christ, not the organization. So Im looking for him and his body outside the walls of church and Im seeing Him everywhere. I am hopeful. Hopeful that even after long winters, the flowers always bloom again. It is never winter forever.
Sick and tired of being sick and tired. Sick of watching the church body hurt people. Living in the Bible Belt with a church literally on every corner and the homemade of AG, I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit going over a year ago. Chronic thyroid problems, depression, an empty marriage, a burned out exhausting hospital career...aren’t you glad you asked? Ha! I love Jesus so much and am having a hard time getting back home to Him again. Not a martyr, just dreadfully weary of these issues. So yes, we do need one another. Thank you Amber for the chance to comment.
Being with a few women friends who love Jesus draws me to Him. I havent been involved in church in quite a while. And this political environment today challenges me to trust God is in control. This is not our home.
Thank you. For reemerging and sending out your words once again. Currently? I'm sitting in an empty nest, trying to "do" my way out of feeling empty hearted after a 26 year season of parenting, which led to the word "be" in the new year and I'm shaken at how incredibly uncomfortable I am. BEing in the His presence rather than DOing for Him is the great unlearning, the beautiful invitation. Who am I without my good works born out of a sincere heart? What do I do with all the BIG feelings I've successfully been too busy for all these years? At 52 I"m asking, Who the hell am I?
It's SO good to hear from you! I often think of you. I have been in a resettling kind of place, thanks to a few years of gradual improvement in health rather than decline. Nothing much has changed in my general description of disability, but my mind is working faster than it used to, and that is a wonderful feeling. I'm beginning to wonder if I can tell my story of chronic illness and faith, after almost 10 years of being housebound. I feel like I am in a stage where I can say , 'It is well with my soul' (which I couldn't for ages), although I don't know where I belong in the Christian world or in my mid-life crisis of a life.
I am finding renewed energy in a feisty desire to call out spiritual abuse and stand along side victims because it's so darn widespread and I'm sick of it.
But I'm also finding I'm tiring of being a public figure and have been quiet on social media. Everyone's hopped off Twitter and gone onto instagram. My life is not photogenic and it's visually very boring, and no one wants to talk with me for a podcast, so really it's a case of me jumping before I was pushed. I think I'm a little bit grieving for that, too.
I could relate to everything you said in your first newsletter. I too felt shut down after publishing my novel. I very much appreciated your honesty because you articulated so honestly how I felt. I have felt lost. I’m not the self motivated person I used to be.
Journaling helps me remember myself. So does cleaning the barn, and walking the dogs down our road, and cleaning the stalls, and picking out my horses’ feet.
I loved your Thursday newsletter. I too wrote a radio short that begins: Glory be to God for poop. Another writer wrote about it too. So what Elizabeth Gilbert says about ideas in the air might not be far off. Manure must be on a lot of minds.
This is a world filled with couples making plans; even reservations point out "based on double occupancy" (or you pay a much higher price) and if you have been left, abandoned, betrayed (which is death) there are no casseroles, cards or condolences. In fact quite the opposite much of the time. Even and especially at church (there must be something wrong with her else why would he have divorced her) where kind folks just don't say anything.
I get it. But..How to face retirement alone.
Not feeling sorry for myself..,really. But this is REALLY an new season and level of ALONE.
Thanks so much for this. How to begin. My space. Almost three years ago, my almost 46 year old first born son shot and killed himself. He lost his battle with alcoholism.
My son John was conceived in my new found faith in 1970. He was raised in it, a hippy faith with intense legalism. We joined a cult after my new husband, given to violent abuse toward my son and me, lured me to come.
Lots of trauma and abuse in our histories. My son's biological father was killed when my baby was 18 months old.
I have had a fifty year relationship with the Christian Faith. I quit the religion of Northwest American Christianity. Too much bad religion in a 2000 year history, (the more I become aware, the worse it gets.) Too much shame and fear based torment in my 50 years with it. Too much torment for my son.
All the beauty power and mystery of the natural world draws me and soothes and comforts me. I live with a disability after a traumatic accident so I am in an aging and loss phase of life. I am drawn to indigenous spirituality whose roots of living in harmony with the earth dig down for thousands of years.
Voices I gravitate to. Yours, Amber. Rachel Held Evans, Kaitlin Curtice, Sarah Bessey, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Jen Hatmaker, Lyndsey Medford, Andre Henry, Tori Williams Douglas, Barbara Brown Taylor, Brene Brown, and more.
I begin my 70th year mid March. That's my nutshell version.
Free Grace and God’s protection. It’s all I truly need. Any other addition is simply heresy and legalistic works. Not all who are saved are called to be disciples. Many leave the church because the institution expects total institutionalization, instead of fellowship
Living in a season of rest, feeling unmoored, drifting. Jesus is my anchor. The harder I try to hold anything else the more lost I find myself. Trying to find my words again.
Watching the finches and junkos and titmice on our feeder this morning, wishing I had a camera that would honour their simple brown-grey beauty against the snow. Feeding them small bites of leftover communion bread and thinking about the way we can offer Jesus to everyone, including these small God-formed brothers and sisters with feathers.
Wrestling with Scripture in small circles of folks, all rabbinic-like, and being awed and renewed by the life and hope and questions I find there. Feels a lot like offering communion to the birds, which isn't as pointless or blasphemous as some might say.
Appreciating lovely ordinary poetic daily gifts through aesthetic experiences in a clean meal, big laughs, anchored good habits, lent devotionals, nature, communion with the saints, sitting honestly with my pain, tea, coffee, intimate relationships...
What a beautiful thread this is, and thank you for the email and invitation to conversation. I'm 41, almost 42, and very much in a season of feeling lost and trying to redefine. I stopped working professionally 12 years ago to stay home with my now 3 girls (12, 11 & 7) and while I wouldn't trade the time I had with them its been a confusing season of identity on so many fronts. Partly due to my own relationship with my mother and growing up in a somewhat dysfunctional household (alcohol and depression) I feel "lost" in parenting on a regular basis (even though I KNOW Christ is with me and I'm doing an ok job, sometimes even a great job with His presence by my side. Amen for that!). I've also struggled with my sense of "purpose", particularly on the days when I longed to be pursuing personal dreams (to be a writer), but years were passing me by where I was so entrenched in parenting that I was too exhausted to write. I know this is "normal", but it's not easy...When you grow up in a home where healthy coping skills are not taught, and neither parent passionately pursued life in any way it creates a "worldview" that has to be intentionally overcome...I'm working on it, but its hard!
Actually I'm really struggling in my faith. I quit church in January after many years of being in unhealthy evangelical churches run by male patriarchal narcissistic pastors. It sounds so cliched, I know. So many years of Christians behaving badly and I've sort of lost my hope in the church. I do love Jesus and want to feel close to him, but even that feels distant now. I just don't feel anything. So I am going through the motions of a spiritual formation practice, doing centering prayer, using the BCP, doing what I don't feel. Ever hopeful.
I'm currently reworking the way I see food and exercise and my body, and in the process uncovering all the decisions I've made based on the fact that I thought one of my life goals was to get thinner. So now - having honest talks with myself about my priorities, (surprise! my deepest desire by the time I'm 90 isn't actually to weigh less!) eating what I really want to, moving how and when I really want to, is freeing my mind and time up to live for connection with Jesus and the humans I care about.
I’ve been reading and reading some more. Taking lots of quiet time in the early morning hours and late evening hours for quiet. After hitting a wall in October, and finally reaching out for help on way of therapy. Things began to get a little better- then my dad died and the mask totally came off. I’ve been having to finally deal with some old pain/wounds from almost 30 years ago that I hadn’t dealt with before. But God is so good. This brokenness has enabled me to fully turn to Him and finally accept and believe God the Father- that he truly has been pursuing me and not just tolerating me. I feel like these past months have been and continue to be a period of refinement. Each area of my life has slowly been changing to reveal how numb I’ve been and how good I had become at pretending. No more. I welcome the pain that produces healing rather than the numbness and tuning out that this world is so good at offering. Your book spoke to me on so many levels! Grateful you are writing again!
what tethers me is not the modern gurus, the online places. it's, the the prophets; isaiah, daniel, habakkuk, etc... and the letters, phillipians, collossians, etc, etc, etc, and reading them-not bit by bit but as whole books. not for some wierd end times or self-serving stuff but just for remembering, belonging, seeing things as they really were and finding hope for things as they really are today. have also found myself gravitating to the old stories and dead authors, amy carmichael, nate saint, isobel kuhn, chambers, bonhoeffer, george mueller, etc..-the ones who write the real, who lived imperfect lives yet reveal in their stories the Lover of their soul meeting them powerfully again and again and again.
also lament. praying the psalms, yes, but also spending regular times weeping and wailing before the One who names the stars.
Jesus said if i lose my life i will find it. that He has proven true again and again and again. setting aside the american dream and worship of self-it's a farce and empty promise. there is a loneliness and fellowship of suffering here, but paradoxically there is Life. the disabilities aren't 'grown out of', the addictions aren't quickly conquered, i mean sometimes they are, but with most it's a walking alongside for years and years clinging to hope when hope seems lost.
Letting go of control, outcomes, and responsibility, first as my two daughters were diagnosed with three different painful, chronic illnesses within the last year and, second, as my son is taking longer than I would like to board a plane from Italy and come home. Control is an illusion. One I have practiced for a lifetime. Arranging outcomes and assuming too much responsibility are specialties that have not served me well. Letting these things go has felt unnatural but necessary in walking toward a truer faith.
Burrowing in Jesus is the only ONLY that has anchored me in the last few years.
Dear Amber its so good to hear from you. I first met you when you spoke at our women's conference @ Life Church in St Louis MO. You said many great things but what opened up my wounded soul was one sentence. "Failure to thrive". You shared your story , your heartache and fears. I refused to give in to mine. But that sentence took the cover off. I sobbed and had to leave the auditorium .My son was in his early teens when he began using drugs. By early 20's he was using heroin , meth and whatever he could get. Fast forward to now, I am in a 12 step recovery program at a local church. I also follow a few on Facebook. They support me and my healing process. My son has been to many rehabs , so many that I found ways to live in the present and to appreciate and love him. God walks me through. I writing this in a hurry because I need to get ready for work. Today my son is 90 days sober. I wasn't prepared to live in hope again. Weird right? Somewhere along this walk I prayed, but stopped hoping. I called on my prayer warrior friends to pull me out of that pit. God told to trust him, not the process. We lose our way so fast.
I don't know if we will get to meet again. Keep telling your story. Someone needs to permission to tell theirs. love you !!
What awesome conversations here in this place! Who would have thunk it?!
Appreciate everyone’s contribution to the conversation.
Girl. I’m just over here trying to get some laughter and silliness in the midst of the heaviness of it all. Sometimes I forget God is not in a bad mood.
It’s always my inclination to stay close to the pain and what he is teaching me through it. That part is full of meaning and beauty and joy. I feel grateful to have learned that.
But right now he keeps me laughing and rowdy.
Finding myself anchored in the person of Jesus and him alone. We have stepped away from the institution of the church after years of questioning what we are all doing there. The instability of the organization that calls itself church has only strengthened my faith that Jesus is the one who cant be shaken. Jesus said “on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not overcome it.” He meant the body of christ, not the organization. So Im looking for him and his body outside the walls of church and Im seeing Him everywhere. I am hopeful. Hopeful that even after long winters, the flowers always bloom again. It is never winter forever.
Sick and tired of being sick and tired. Sick of watching the church body hurt people. Living in the Bible Belt with a church literally on every corner and the homemade of AG, I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit going over a year ago. Chronic thyroid problems, depression, an empty marriage, a burned out exhausting hospital career...aren’t you glad you asked? Ha! I love Jesus so much and am having a hard time getting back home to Him again. Not a martyr, just dreadfully weary of these issues. So yes, we do need one another. Thank you Amber for the chance to comment.
Being with a few women friends who love Jesus draws me to Him. I havent been involved in church in quite a while. And this political environment today challenges me to trust God is in control. This is not our home.
Thank you. For reemerging and sending out your words once again. Currently? I'm sitting in an empty nest, trying to "do" my way out of feeling empty hearted after a 26 year season of parenting, which led to the word "be" in the new year and I'm shaken at how incredibly uncomfortable I am. BEing in the His presence rather than DOing for Him is the great unlearning, the beautiful invitation. Who am I without my good works born out of a sincere heart? What do I do with all the BIG feelings I've successfully been too busy for all these years? At 52 I"m asking, Who the hell am I?
It's SO good to hear from you! I often think of you. I have been in a resettling kind of place, thanks to a few years of gradual improvement in health rather than decline. Nothing much has changed in my general description of disability, but my mind is working faster than it used to, and that is a wonderful feeling. I'm beginning to wonder if I can tell my story of chronic illness and faith, after almost 10 years of being housebound. I feel like I am in a stage where I can say , 'It is well with my soul' (which I couldn't for ages), although I don't know where I belong in the Christian world or in my mid-life crisis of a life.
I am finding renewed energy in a feisty desire to call out spiritual abuse and stand along side victims because it's so darn widespread and I'm sick of it.
But I'm also finding I'm tiring of being a public figure and have been quiet on social media. Everyone's hopped off Twitter and gone onto instagram. My life is not photogenic and it's visually very boring, and no one wants to talk with me for a podcast, so really it's a case of me jumping before I was pushed. I think I'm a little bit grieving for that, too.
Oodles of love to you and everyone
I could relate to everything you said in your first newsletter. I too felt shut down after publishing my novel. I very much appreciated your honesty because you articulated so honestly how I felt. I have felt lost. I’m not the self motivated person I used to be.
Journaling helps me remember myself. So does cleaning the barn, and walking the dogs down our road, and cleaning the stalls, and picking out my horses’ feet.
I loved your Thursday newsletter. I too wrote a radio short that begins: Glory be to God for poop. Another writer wrote about it too. So what Elizabeth Gilbert says about ideas in the air might not be far off. Manure must be on a lot of minds.
How to face retirement alone.
This is a world filled with couples making plans; even reservations point out "based on double occupancy" (or you pay a much higher price) and if you have been left, abandoned, betrayed (which is death) there are no casseroles, cards or condolences. In fact quite the opposite much of the time. Even and especially at church (there must be something wrong with her else why would he have divorced her) where kind folks just don't say anything.
I get it. But..How to face retirement alone.
Not feeling sorry for myself..,really. But this is REALLY an new season and level of ALONE.
Dear Amber,
Thanks so much for this. How to begin. My space. Almost three years ago, my almost 46 year old first born son shot and killed himself. He lost his battle with alcoholism.
My son John was conceived in my new found faith in 1970. He was raised in it, a hippy faith with intense legalism. We joined a cult after my new husband, given to violent abuse toward my son and me, lured me to come.
Lots of trauma and abuse in our histories. My son's biological father was killed when my baby was 18 months old.
I have had a fifty year relationship with the Christian Faith. I quit the religion of Northwest American Christianity. Too much bad religion in a 2000 year history, (the more I become aware, the worse it gets.) Too much shame and fear based torment in my 50 years with it. Too much torment for my son.
All the beauty power and mystery of the natural world draws me and soothes and comforts me. I live with a disability after a traumatic accident so I am in an aging and loss phase of life. I am drawn to indigenous spirituality whose roots of living in harmony with the earth dig down for thousands of years.
Voices I gravitate to. Yours, Amber. Rachel Held Evans, Kaitlin Curtice, Sarah Bessey, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Jen Hatmaker, Lyndsey Medford, Andre Henry, Tori Williams Douglas, Barbara Brown Taylor, Brene Brown, and more.
I begin my 70th year mid March. That's my nutshell version.
Free Grace and God’s protection. It’s all I truly need. Any other addition is simply heresy and legalistic works. Not all who are saved are called to be disciples. Many leave the church because the institution expects total institutionalization, instead of fellowship