I hope you're happy

Have you seen those “I met my younger self for coffee” reels? They’re based off a poem by Jennae Cecilia, from her book Deep In My Feels, but they kind of took on a life of their own a few weeks ago, as viral trends do. I didn’t make one, but I saw them from nearly every influencer, brand, or business owner in my feed. In all the ones I saw, the predictable pattern was an older, wiser, less anxious “self” showing up to comfort a scattered and scared younger one, who was eminently grateful for the hug, tears, and pep talk.

The question that kept popping into mind for me was, “Doesn’t anyone have a younger self who is disappointed in what their future self has become?” (Or am I the only one whose younger self was a jerk?)

If I met my 21-year-old self for coffee today, she’d be so uncomfortable I think she’d clam up and refuse to speak to me, or—more likely—nod along with me agreeably while inwardly screaming “ARE YOU TELLING ME WE TURNED INTO A HERETIC?!”

I know her so well, but she doesn’t know me at all. She can’t fathom the changes wrought by heartbreak, sleep deprivation, or depression—the chipping away and continual molding of marriage, motherhood, and parenting. In her worldview there is no circumstance in which exiting her evangelical world and returning to liturgy makes sense; there is no universe in which questioning complementarian theology (let alone rejecting it) is anything short of a moral failure. There is certainly no space in her imagination for a day when she would contemplate the legitimacy of baptizing infants, chuckle a bit at the timeline of the end-times she drew in the back of her study Bible, or—God forbid!—sit in pews with people whose beliefs are varied and unknown to her, and haven’t been screened out by a lengthy “statement of faith” on the church website.

If she found out she would one day be the topic of concerned whispers by the elder board or disappointed remarks by mentors and friends, I think she’d have crawled into a hole and died (maybe after shaking me violently and screaming “HOW DARE YOU TURN INTO THIS?! HOW DARE YOU RUIN MY LIFE?!”).

But I hope she would be able to find, somewhere inside, the piece of her that was always there—compassionate and thoughtful and not-quite-a-clean-fit to the world she was trying so hard to fit into. I hope, like Glinda at the end of Wicked, she’d find some capacity to say, “I hope you’re happy”—even if she couldn’t imagine following me off the ledge.

Because that’s what I’d say to her. I don’t want to scold her, or rush her, or talk down to her about her narrow thinking and fear of the opinions of others. There’s so much life in between, so much of God’s slow and patient cultivation. If I spook her now I could interrupt it all.

So—I do. I hope she’s happy. I know she was, in many ways. But I know now there’s a certain depth of flavor missing from happiness when it hasn’t yet been seasoned with sorrow.

I wish I could tell her not to be afraid when things change, life hurts, and people hurt most of all. I wish I could tell her not to flinch when she hears the voices saying, “Look at her! She’s wicked! Get her!” But I can’t, she’s not ready. I’m not even ready—I still flinch at the thought of the labels they’d give me now.

All I can do is reassure her that the road she’s on still leads to Jesus, even if it’s lonelier sometimes. Her delight in the Scriptures and desire to share their wisdom with others won’t change, and in fact will only expand and deepen as she follows the guidance of the Spirit. The God she has known since childhood will prove Himself changeless and trustworthy, and He will provide gifts of reassurance that He is not simply waiting on high for her to screw something up—that His character is always to have mercy.

And I’d try to tell her that she’ll find God only gets bigger and more beautiful the more she explores Him and gazes upon Him—even when the path that leads “further up and further in” makes some turns she won’t see coming, some risks she doesn’t quite want to take but also can’t resist. She will taste freedom and never want to go back.

So, to my 21-year-old self, the one who would be deeply disappointed in me: I hope you’re happy, my friend.

I know I am.

truth and beauty

I wish I had music in my soul. It seems easier to put voice to it all that way, to put the hard unbeautiful words into some beautiful form that goes down easier. You can say more while saying less and the critics are too busy nitpicking the sound to go hard against the lyrics.

Plain words in a plain paragraph form, like this, leave nowhere to hide. I tell you what I think and wait to be torn to shreds for it. I write prose for the same reason people write poetry, but without the poetic form to excuse my emotion as “art.” Mine will be dismissed as the emotions of a weak vessel, but if this were a song the emotions would be considered its life force.

The feelings are allowed in art.

No wonder art has lost its place in church.

There’s at least some small exodus from Evangelicalism, Inc., with its warehouse buildings and windowless sanctuaries, back into traditions that lean into rhyme, rhythm, color, and beauty along with the truth. To my surprise, I have joined it.

If you follow my life in a timeline of the churches I’ve been part of, you’ll find that I followed the light: from four different windowless warehouses with bare walls to migrating into the well-lit foyer to, finally, sitting down every week in a cozy former synagogue with tall windows down each side, sunlight pouring generously in. There are small reproduced paintings in between the window frames depicting various Biblical scenes, and colorful banners hang on the walls. The altar is draped in rich fabric according to the liturgical season. Candles flicker. It’s humble, and it’s beautiful.

The feelings are allowed in beauty.

Truth and beauty are two of my highest values, but they’ve always felt at odds with each other. In this culture, we use phrases like “the awful truth” or “the ugly truth”—the thing nobody wants to hear, but somebody has to be brave enough to say. Those who offend with the truth get recognition. For several years, I tried this tactic on for size in my own writing, and it worked; it got a lot of comments and shares and traffic. It felt like I was doing something that mattered.

But it was ugly. Marked by pride, flattery, ego, and conflict. Even if everything I wrote was true, very little of it was honest.

Honesty is where truth and beauty find overlap.

The feelings are allowed in honesty.

In the realm of Christianity I’ve spent the most time in, there is this unspoken idea that the only really-true truth is the one that has been stripped of every element of life. “Real” truth, Truth with a capital T, should sound like a mathematical fact or a scientific law: black and white and unarguable and entirely dismissive of complicating factors like God or relationship or humanity.

Any emotion or soul or spirit—even the Holy Spirit Himself—renders a truth-claim suspect.

It’s idiotic, really. We were made human, in the image of God, only to attempt to become robots in how we discern what is true. We’ve made a sort of idol out of certainty—out of being able to believe a “fact” simply because “God said so,” without regard for the creative evidence both within us and without us that screams our facts are at best incomplete. Our truth is not honest.

If we are honest, humans were created for beauty. Humans are wired for emotions. Humans thrive in relationship. If we’re honest, relationships and emotions are some of the messiest and grayest areas of life. You can’t slap a mathematical fact or a scientific law on any of it. It’s just too unpredictable.

To me, that’s why it’s beautiful.

It’s a glimpse of God at work—glorious, fierce, incomprehensible. It’s a reminder that I am not in control and I don’t get to tell Him who He is. It’s walking under the trees in a whipping wind while the sky roils with thunderheads, or lying in the grass with the sun on your face and the thin buzz of honeybees all around. It’s the familiar rhythm of spring rolling into summer or the phases of the moon, punctuated by the chaos of invisible solar storms or devastating natural disasters.

There is order and there is chaos. There is truth and there is beauty. There is body and there is emotion. There is what we know and a whole universe of what we don’t know at all.

Honesty—the space where truth and beauty overlap—is what I see at the heart of the exodus from warehouse to window-light. I, for one, am worn out by robotic certainty and “the ugly truth,” because I know that the honest truth, the truth that holds space for the divine as well as the human, is beautiful.

God is beautiful and the maker of beauty. God is true and the standard of truth. My job, as His image-bearer and witness, is honesty.

Drem, and her dreamer

Last night I watched a current of wispy pinkish clouds float across a lapis lazuli sky and wondered if that’s what it would look like to see the train of the Lord’s robe fill the temple. It was one of those precious, fleeting moments when the veil between heaven and earth feels nearly transparent—I could see the flame of the Holy Spirit flickering over neighbors’ houses, while the happy wild daisies bobbed together along the roadside to remind me of the Great Cloud of Witnesses that cheer me on from the next realm.

It was a gift that I didn’t know I would need to carry me into this hard day.

My horse, Drem, passed away overnight, at home on my parents’ farm. My mom called to tell me this morning. Dad buried her on the hill that rises beyond the creekbed that runs beside her corral, in view of Mt. Adams.

I call her mine, but she was really shared between me and my sister, Hannah. I think of her as my lifelong confidant and friend, but she didn’t enter my life until I was 12 and I only saw her sporadically after I got married at 20. Mom, Dad, Hannah, and Amy all spent more time with her in the last ten years than I did. Even so, the bond between a horse and her girl is real, and without her sweet spirit on this side of it anymore, the veil between heaven and earth seems a lot thicker today.

It’s a literary cliche at this point, but with good reason: A love for horses has been tattooed on my inner being since before I had the words to express it. I distinctly remember the ache in my chest every time I saw someone else riding a horse, every time I watched Black Beauty, every time we passed horses grazing in a field on the way to church on Sunday mornings—starting at three or four years old, if I had to guess. I remember the hours Hannah and I would spend poring over horse books, magazines, and Breyer model horse catalogs. We eventually outlet our obsession by writing and illustrating our own horse stories (shout out to my beloved fictional racehorse, Robin Hood).

Drem was my dream come true. She came to us as a seven-year-old greenbroke quarter horse mare named “Lady,” and we renamed her “Dreamer” because she had the same coloring as Soñador from the movie, Dreamer. But the name evolved over the years to fit the horse she really was: quick, endearing, a little bit unexpected, and highly independent.

The hardest part of anticipating this parting, besides surviving the crashing waves of grief, has been wondering who I will be without her. In so many ways, she formed me: I learned how to lend her my calm when she was nervous instead of adding my own anxiety into the mix; I learned to lead with confidence even when my follower is ten times my size; I learned what it feels like to be free and independent on those long, solitary rides in the fields or around the Winterstein loop.

To her, I was strong and trustworthy, a safe place—even when I felt scared, small, and weak. Sometimes all it takes to become something is for someone to believe that’s what you already are.

I had no idea back then that the horse I was trying to train was actually training me in all the skills I now use daily to be a wife, a mom, a disciple.

It’s hard to release her, the link between Hallie the child and Hallie the adult, especially knowing that she might be the only horse I’ll ever have that is really “mine.” But the tattoo on my inner being is still there. I’m still the same dreamer, meeting God beneath cloud-trails and on horseback, in the shadow of mountains and the sunshine of daisies.

And I know who I’ll be riding in the ranks of the armies of heaven. ☺