How to live a remarkable life.

My mama always told me to live sideways. She never said those words exactly, but she showed me with the way she ambled through meadows and rambling, long, drawn-out conversations and fed the birds and walked strong, shoulders square. How she drank her coffee black and planted lavender and oak trees and wasn't afraid of the spiders or the dusk. She preached it with her brimming confidence and Chanel N°5 and hair pulled back in a hot kitchen while canning plums. My mother embodied sideways living for my entire childhood. I owe her everything for that. 

Some of the best things I've learned are the things my mother never said to me but always meant. 

My mama always told me to live sideways. 

Not a lot of people get that. It's not something that's written like a map on your bones. It's a subtle, simple thing, and you have to learn it. If no one ever taught you to live horizontally, the thought of it probably even causes your heart to clench, at a least a little bit. 

Surprisingly, it's the people who you would most likely expect to live vertically who understand best how to live sideways. Maybe it's because they have everything and realize that they really don't. Or maybe it's because of a sunrise that they should have missed but didn't. Or maybe their mama never told them either but she showed them too. I don't know. All I really know is Johnny Cash had it right when he was asked what paradise was and he replied,

"This morning, with her, having coffee." 

Most of our lives we're told that success and victory will only come if you live vertically, but that's a lie, and that lie leads to an unremarkable life. History tells a different story. The people who dared to live in the dirt, the ones who slowed down, those who chose to stop climbing mountains and instead began to push them aside, the people who dared to wave banners or stand instead of sit, those are the most remarkable people. Those are the people whose stories that you read make your spirit swoon and poetry suddenly makes sense. 

G. K. Chesterton once wrote that "...we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure." Many of us–myself included at times–have been negligent of this pursuit. We become so wrapped up in the secure, that we dismiss the strange as completely and unequivocally unnecessary. We forget wonder, and we forget how to slow down. See, we have mistaken the rush and necessity of success in this life for the secure, but it isn't really. It's the small satisfaction you get from welcoming simple moments into your life. It's the pleasure of the raw. It's a life lived looking and noticing through rose-colored glasses. And we have written the strange off as too strange, as foreign or daring, but once you recognize the strange for what it really is, you understand that it is not meant to make you quake in your boots always but rather only to lead an adventurous existence daily and with a spirit of jubilee. The strange is the way things shift, the growth that spills out of the constancy of someone's life. It's not always brave and courageous and dangerous or snapping and biting. Yes, sometimes the strange is a sunset in Budapest instead of Alabama, and sometimes the strange is simply the arrival of the dusk.

Sideways living is a romantic insistence; it's the welcome embrace of the familiar and the dare of the unfamiliar.

This past year was maybe the hardest of my life. 

Things happened that I didn't want to happen, things that I never dreamed could or would happen to those that I love. The month of February almost killed me. I still remember quite clearly a week of coming home from classes and laying on the cold floors of my dark house and just sobbing, weeping the hardest I had ever wept in my life. 

There was this one day when I couldn't catch my breath.

I panicked. I gave up. It was a dark day, and I sat on my kitchen floor next to a cup full of tea that wasn't even warm anymore and I shouted up to Christ. I told Him that He had abandoned me, and I got so frustrated and sobbed so hard that I began to hyperventilate. I learned to be angry at God this year, in a way I didn't think I could. Truthfully, I felt like He ripped my heart out of my chest, and I thought He did it on purpose. And with that thought came months of grey and despair and restlessness, and finally a silver lining.
But then October arrived, and I felt as if everything constant and sure in my life had been snatched from me in a moment, a decision, and a choice. I found myself wavering and not knowing who to turn to because I was trying to be the shoulder again, but I was just as weak. And there I was again, in that bleariness and bleakness. I stood by the river one morning, and threw handfuls of stones and dirt into the water while I breathed loudly in desperation and hurt. I felt abandoned, and I wanted to blame the Maker. Philippians didn't say what I wanted it to, and I didn't even know how to say what I wanted it to. Honestly, I'm still standing in the wake of October and her harshness. I was sitting in a new pastor's front room with my family on Christmas Eve, and I looked around me and thought, How did I get here? From what I had, to here. How did this happen? How is the one thing I never thought I would lose gone?
And I still don't know the answer to that.

I learned what hopelessness is this year. 

I learned what it is like to be deserted. 

I'm going to tell you one of the hardest truths I've learned. 

Living a remarkable life hurts. 

There is safety and certainty in vertical living. If you're always going up or going forwards, direction is so evident. Most people don't even need a compass, where they're going is incredibly clear to them. Their path is marked, and it is marked well. Because people tell you what to do when you live vertically; they even tell you who to be. And dismissing those around you who may have been dealt a lesser hand in life is a little bit easier. It's less risky to ignore the less fortunate when you live vertically.

I chose to be like Christian, in "The Pilgrim's Progress," this year. Part of me knew when I decided that, that I would regret it, at least a little. And I do. And I don't. Christian turns away from and loses almost everything, but he also gains even more.

The things that have been taken from me and my loved ones this year are things I never for a second thought would be lost. Yet they were. It's December, and the impossible became possible this year. 

It's because I am choosing to live sideways. I understand that all of these tragedies and hardships are consequences of a horizontal life, because a vertical life is an apathetic life, and when you don't really bother to care, hardly anything hurts. But when you live sideways, when you actually stop, take a step back, look around, and breathe, then pain arrives. It's almost like you're inviting him in. You tell him, I decided! I decided to care! Come get me. And he does. 

And he almost kills you.

But still you wake up. Because with tragedy comes the promise of redemption. I know that's what 2015 will be for me, a redemption year. Because after Christian goes through the valley of the shadow of death, a new day comes when the sun rises and he meets Faithful. You have no idea how much I want that redemption, how hard I yearn for that faith, how many times I have repeated to myself, 

Come January, please come. 

I have been home for December. The other day, I went and sat outside, up against the shop wall, in the cold and with a steaming mug of black coffee beside me. I was writing in my journal. I had planned to write a lot actually, but the only words I put on the page were these: "Not everything lasts forever, and that is okay." And then I leaned my head back and looked up at the white sky and breathed. Because I was still alive. I had that day. I had purpose, and I still do. I chose to live sideways in that moment, not behind in the past and my loss and regrets, and not forward into the worries and cares of my future, but then. Right then. In the welcoming presence of my childhood home and the unknown that will come about in this next year, and in everything surrounding that.
I heard the late geese migrating.
I watched the steam float above my coffee cup.
I felt small wooden splinters digging into my hand.
I noticed the frost on the dead grass.
I recited Keats and Ecclesiastes under my breath.
I pulled my sweater tighter around me, and felt tininess and largeness.
I dwelt in the presence of my Maker, and the closeness of my family.
I lived, I lived, I lived.

I lived, I lived, I lived.

Yes, this last year has been a hard one. There has been many a time when I felt like Bilbo, and wanted only to crawl back into the safety of my hobbit hole, into the warm yellow light of vertical living, but I didn't. Instead, I kept on the path, journeying sideways with the magic and the beasts and the humans about me. Learning, discovering, bleeding, finding, losing, battling. Loving. Because sideways living requires loving, and as C. S. Lewis said, "To love at all is to be vulnerable." But it's worth it. I swear it's worth it. I would know.

So slow down. Breathe a little deeper. Dare harder. Drink more coffee, and very well make it black. Drive miles. Battle battles. Remain. Wake up. Show up for people, even startle them. Read Jude, and read it again, and again. Walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Go, and stay, be an hundred different places in heart, mind, and soul, but choose to be fully present more often than not. Laugh. Weep. Grow and shift, embrace the changes. Discover Christ and allow Him to discover you, intimately and in a real manner. Pursue people. Build a home. See the world. Think outside of yourself for once. Give, give, give.
Be "as kind as summer."
Live remarkably.
Love.

Shrugging off anchors.

In church, we've been going through the story of Joseph, and today we talked about guilt and forgiveness and grace. I like reading about Joseph because there's reconciliation and weeping. It's one of the only times in the Bible when it's actually written that a man cries. Most of the time we're left guessing what the characters are feeling, the state of their emotions. But not with Joseph.
Joseph sobs.
When he first meets Benjamin, he sobs so hard that he has to leave the room to keep up his charade. I love that. I feel like I know him because of that.

This morning Pastor Mark talked about the guilt that the brothers felt. How they lived for twenty-two years harboring a secret, unsure whether Joseph was alive or dead, but certain that they could not confess what they had done. He spoke of their fear. There is a part in chapter forty-two of Genesis, when the brothers are explaining who they are, and they say that they are twelve brothers. Ten of them are present, Benjamin is at home, and one—Joseph, one is no more.
One is no more.
They still count him. They still consider him a brother, alive or dead. They still think of him daily.

They have carried Joseph with them, and the grief and shame and despair and bitterness over what they have done, for the past twenty-two years since the day they exchanged him for twenty pieces of silver.

Their brother never left them. He was a weight on their back since the moment he was dragged away by the slave-traders.

I think we all carry weights like that. I know that I have. But that is so wrong. That is so wrong of us to do. Pastor Mark said today, That is an affront to God. And it is. It is a slap in His face to bear useless burdens of guilt and bitterness and anger and resentment and animosity. To say to Him, This one? This one is just too big for You. Not even You could understand. I've got to keep it on, I have to wear it, it makes me who I am. It took me a long time to see that. That that is a sin. Years, actually. But one day I sat on the edge of my bed, weeping, and realizing that this was on me. All of my condemnation and guilt and perpetual suffering, that was my doing. And I had to get over myself. I remember clenching my fists and pressing them onto my thighs while I heard the words my Pastor had said that morning in church, over and over again in my head.

Don't you dare be condemned. 

And then and there, I had to own up to my shortcomings.
I had to let it all go.
I had to forgive.

I am pleading with you now, if you haven't, do the same. Just get over yourself. Don't walk around blaming yourself or others. Don't harbor those sour feelings. Don't wallow in bitterness and unforgiveness. Don't let that weight hang on your back. Don't walk around with an anchor around your neck.
Shrug it off.
Because we can never truly be alive in Christ unless we take off our own guilt and put on his yoke and burden. It is not our job to judge the heaviness of our shame and sufferings as too much for the Carpenter to carry. And I think it's important that we tell each other that. That we say, It's okay. It's okay to feel sorry about something. It's okay to be in pain about something. It's okay to let experiences and choices you or someone else has made shape you in some way. What is not okay, is if you dwell in that. If you live there, and you refuse to let it all go and forgive. It is not okay to let that rule your life. I think we're scared to say those things. I think we're afraid of being thought of as un-compassionate or unfeeling or harsh. But it is too detrimental to stay silent about this. And I will not be quiet anymore. I will not let you drown for my fear of being severe and inconsiderate.

Do not let unforgiveness and guilt sink you.

Don't live with something you don't have to. Confess it. Cry about it. Grow from it. Let it go. We all make mistakes. We all sin. We all mess up. We don't all have to choose to go down with our guilt and suffering. We don't all have to wear anchors. In truth, no one does. So be bigger than you make yourself out to be. Be more forgiving, more understanding, more intentional. Do not be one of Joseph's brothers, waiting twenty-two years to be redeemed and forgiven. Be a Joseph. Name your past Manasseh and forget about it, and then call your present and future Ephraim, and expect plenteousness.

Animosity and guilt are not only worth nothing, but they are devices that will suffocate you and engulf your existence. They will pull you further from the One who loves you most. They will make you a stranger to Him. And they will cause you to sin, and create a rift between you and He who can save you.
Don't go down in a ship with the national guard standing by, arms outstretched and ready to catch you.
It would be a tragedy, because it would be your choice.
There is so much more of a wondrous life for you if you get over yourself. Christ has so many more valuable things for you to do than to spend your time feeling sorry for yourself. There is devotion and adoration and beauty, if you only take a breath and surrender. I promise that it is worth it. I know it doesn't seem like it would be, I have been in that position. I once locked myself up in bitterness and then caged myself with guilt. And it feels like there is no way out. But I want you to know, you need to know, there is. You don't have to continue in the way that you are. You don't have to be the same. You don't have to wear that heavy weight. You can shrug it off. You can be redeemed and relieved and renewed. And it is so much more beautiful than you can imagine. Friends, it is so much more glorious to worship and follow Him if we are not trapped by the things we have or have not done.

Hurt and guilt are all-consuming, but only if you let them be. Grace is ever-present, but only when you accept it.