Words Left Me

In September I immersed myself in Sheshi and Trudie’s lives, working together with them to write his story.

And then I stopped writing. 

Gil’s mom died. Sheshi died. Both from brain tumors. I read about the fathers in Afghanistan who are selling off their little girls so that they can feed their other children, about the nursing mothers in Tigray, Ethiopia, who eat leaves but produce no milk. 

Josiah broke his collarbone playing soccer and needed surgery. We discovered Johnny needs myofunctional therapy, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Unsettling emails came from school, which led to a visit to a psychiatrist with one of our children. 

I felt unwell for most of October. I stopped sleeping. I discovered I’m anemic. I still don’t know how much my body was speaking to my mind or my mind was speaking to my body. 

Words left me in October. It’s the end of November and I am sleeping better and feeling better, but I’m still struggling to find words. I’ve stared at a blinking cursor on this blank document for restless days.

I’m an alien in this country. I read online comments and memes by American Christians and don’t recognize their belief system. It used to be that you could discover a new Christian friend and have an assumption that you share the same basic beliefs. Now I walk around on ice, tiptoeing around others lest I cause more hurt and division than is already there. 

When I was a kid, we played a game called “Upset Fruit Basket.” Sitting in a circle, everyone was given the name of a fruit, and a caller in the middle would yell “Cherry!” and anyone who was a cherry would have to run and find a new seat. 

But the most fun part of the game was when the caller would yell “Upset fruit basket!” and everyone got to stand up and run to find a new seat. Everybody screamed; everybody ran in a different direction. It was chaos. 

I feel like the world is that game, and the caller just upset the fruit basket. But it’s not fun.

There are a great many things I am not sure of anymore. The place of politics for a Christian. What freedoms are worth fighting for. If and where my theological culture has contributed to abuse and racism. How to raise teenagers to love Truth, to love Jesus, to love others while swimming against a tidal wave. I am lost.

I am not deconstructing my faith. I did that many years ago, and the reconstruction remains firm. But the ground underneath me is rattling, and not because I live in earthquake country. It is disturbing to realize how much my faith has been tangled up in institutions and Big Names and ideology that might not be as biblical as I thought. I found smug security by holing up in fortresses that felt holy but were man-made, and now crumbling. 

Writing helps me to figure out what I think. So here I am, writing again, but with less confidence. Perhaps, though, it was confidence that never should have been there. The older I become, the more I see the world, the more I wrestle with the mystery of God, I become less sure of many things. But more sure of a few things. So with war-weary eyes, I continue to look up.