jesusween

Would you like to hear about my Halloween weekend? It was very happy and very sad. Two, two, two mints in one! I get giddy watching the kids get so excited about it. Costumes and candy are magical for them and they know that Christmas is next and it’s all so precious. Friday night the kids each had Halloween costume party sleepovers and so that’s like free babysitting all night long so David and I went to the KEXP Reykjavík show and I saw Joan Hiller and gave her lots of hugs, she is magically super! And Dave Bazan played and he opened with “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” and my heart totally melted and pooled into my feet. He closed with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on mandolin and that kind of made my brain short out. Then he told me afterwards that he loved the last Dongtini where I talked about seeing Eugene Peterson on the SPU campus and my panic attack I had being around the Christian culture. He said that I have this perspective that he has too where he’s drawn to something huge and eternal but on the other hand has all this rage at the culture. Made me so happy to hear him say that about it. (Here is that Dongtini episode, in case you give a flying royal rip. I heard a youth pastor say that at Kanakuk camp in 9th grade —“I don’t give a flying, royal rip”—and I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard and still think it in my head all the time.)

Here is part of the sad bit though, Friday night was hard because I ran into someone who goes to the church we left last year, and they said “Have you seen the pastor’s house? They built a new story on top of it and it’s gorgeous! It’s huge and mod.” It was hard not to cry when she said that, because that pastor fired the guy who did the music for the church, and that guy is now struggling to pay his mortgage and barely making it. It’s been so hard on his family. His wife works swing shift at a hospital (3 to 11 pm) and hardly gets to see the kids during the week, and it has been such a huge negative impact on all of them. My insides hurt so much that they may lose their house because of something a church did to them. Hearing this pastor’s house news hurt my heart all night and it’s still with me, obviously. Beyond the financial part of losing your job, this firing has all the emotional and spiritual stuff stemming from being cut off from close relationships that are underscored by the God thing. I know his kids will always be marked by what has happened to them. This sort of tragedy cuts deep. I can't think of anything more tragic than treating a church like a business instead of as a family.

Then another difficult emotional thing happened on Halloween, we went to a party and when I walked in there were two people who make me want to cry when I see them, so I went back outside and sat in the car. I kept wondering if I was being really immature but if I’d have stayed I would have just cried and that would have seemed really super immature. The next day I got emails from those people that made me cry. How many times have I said the word 'cry' in this post? I’ve been working all of this out in therapy for the past four or five years and have some clarity on where this stems from in relation to my story, and so I’m trying to hold that while at the same time honor the fact that I can’t be in the same room with someone who makes me cry just looking at them. I want to talk it out and they haven’t been willing to do that, but maybe someday we can. I have to talk about this on Dongtini.

So there’s that! Do you like how much I tell? Can you believe there’s so much more I don’t? I’m an enigma! A riddle!