I was talking recently with a woman in I know who is raising her grandchild, a kid who is friends with mine.  Addiction and mental illness swirl around the kid’s parents.  The grandma spoke with regret about how much drama this kid has had to live with in a short life.  I said her grandkid was welcome to come over and hang out with us pretty much any time.  ”We’re totally boring,” I said, with great enthusiasm.

I am really quite proud of the boring.  So much so, I want to share the boring whenever possible.

Boring is a relatively recent development in my life.  For most of my twenties, I suffered from depression and anxiety, and our marriage was a rollercoaster of drama.  Plus, my whole personality type pretty much craves drama like a fish craves water.  It’s my natural environment.

Yup. This is my kid.

I’m sure it wasn’t the most peaceful environment for my own oldest kid.  I’ve been watching him rapidly transform into a teenager for the last six months or so, a process that will be official in a couple of weeks on his thirteenth birthday.  He’s taller than I am now. (Not a major accomplishment, as I’m only 5′ 4″ or so, but still.)

His voice changed literally overnight–he woke up one day a baritone.  It took me a week to realize he didn’t have a head cold.  (I’m not sure if that’s denial at work, or the fact that I’m self-absorbed and thus a little slow on the uptake as it relates to things that are happening with other people.)

But back to my main point, families that can’t quite get their stuff together are near and dear to my heart.  That was us for a really long time.

"I saw the sign, and it opened up my eyes I saw the sign..."

Loving on my neighbor is something I’m struggling to get better at, now that I don’t have the excuse of my life being a major disaster getting in the way.  Hospitality, in the sense of being a good cook or housekeeper, is not one of my major gifts (somewhere, people who have seen my house are snorting with agreement on this).

Neither is administration (we still require occasional nastygrams from the cafeteria ladies reminding us to send lunch money for the Mini Sith Princess.)  But I will totally hang out and play video games and watch chick flicks with a kid who just needs a little down time from the drama.  I can do that.  That is totally within my scope of capability.

As much as I recognize that my currently boring life is a blessing, I also realize it’s a blessing I can share.

An ugly little habit you see in the evangelical subculture is the tendency for parents to cloister their family away from anyone who might infect their lives with drama.  Moms are often unwilling to let their kids spend time with kids whose home life doesn’t meet their standards.  I get not wanting to send your little muffin into a potential crack house, but stuff like that leads to things like the couple in Texas that fakes Christianity so their kids can have a social life.

Frankly, if’ I’d been more transparent about what was really going on in my life and marriage, I’m not sure we would have made the cut with some of our friends in previous times.

As an introvert, things like just having a conversation with my neighbor take me out of my comfort zone.   When I say the previous drama in my life was an excuse for not loving on my neighbor, I mean that.  It was an excuse.   Not a legitimate reason. The tiny, beautiful rural county I live in has more meth labs per capita than any other in Indiana.  No matter how messed up we were, there are people in my neighborhood who are in worse shape.

People (mostly teenagers) complain that our small town is boring. If you ask me, it’s not nearly boring enough.  There are too many sirens in a town of ~600 people.  I’ve heard from my high school friend (a police officer) how often those sirens announce a home  disrupted by drugs and  domestic violence.

Chris asked me last week what I’m excited about.  He’s got some really cool stuff going on in his life right now, and he’s in that giddy “telling everyone he knows about it” stage.

Right now, I want to spread the boring.  I want my neighborhood to be the most awesomely boring spot on earth. That’s what’s exciting me.

What about you?

Stories Of Change from Sojourn Community Church on Vimeo.

Yep, that’s the two of us on the couch, about a minute in.  I posted it here for a few reasons.

First, for every one or two people who comment here, there are a few hundred to a few thousand who visit and read each month.  I see them in my analytics.  They find my posts via Google and Stumbleupon and other tools.  I’m posting this for the people who are now where I was before.  Who have been told they are hopeless cases.  Who are wondering if they should just give up.  People like the guy who stopped my commute a few weeks ago.

There are no hopeless cases, where God is concerned. Really.

I’m also posting it is because it’s time I shared it here.  I’ve been looking for a way to do that for a long time now, and this video and the timing of some other things have  made it abundantly clear that this is the right time.  Every time I’ve written here in the last few years about the part of my story that I don’t share, this is mostly what I was talking about.

So now it’s out there. I’ve been watching the “views” tick slowly upward on that video, and knowing that over the last three weeks, probably over a thousand members of my church have seen it.  I’ve realized that this part of my story needs to be out there.  I needed it to be out there so I could be free.  Because a secret chains you into keeping it secret.  I needed the story to be redeemed, and for that to happen, it had to be released into the wild to encourage and help other people.  It can’t do anyone any good stuffed into my dresser drawer.  And it really is a powerful story.

I struggled with depression throughout my twenties. At one point I was hospitalized on suicide watch.  Eight years ago, I was so depressed that I found myself in my kitchen in the middle of the night, a knife pressed against my carotid, weighing whether living or dying was the more painful option.  I put the knife down when my five year old son walked into the room.

I had almost no friends, my self-worth was so low that I was afraid I lacked the basic competence to hold down a low-paying job, and my husband was involved with another woman, a coworker who was also having marriage problems.

We were working opposite shifts at the time–I worked from 6:30am to 3 and he was working from 2pm to 11 at night.  We barely saw each other.  I started taking No-Doz and basically not sleeping for days at a time so I could compete for his attention.  Everyone was telling me that I should just give up.  There’s no coming back from that.  At one point, the other woman told me I might as well kill myself, because from what she heard, even my own family wouldn’t miss me.

And there are more details, and this could quickly get sordid and all Lifetime unOriginal “Elin Woods, Sandra Bullock and me,” but the bottom line is, I am both the victim and the villain of my own story.  I had been a mess for a long time.  I wasn’t at rock bottom because my husband was considering turning me in for a newer model.  I was at rock bottom because I looked at the Cross, believed it was true, and still decided that wasn’t enough to make life worth living if I didn’t matter to my husband.

That’s pretty effed up.  If you believe someone willingly died to give you life, but if you can’t get this one thing you want, then they can just keep it–that’s fundamentally effed up.

But here’s the beautiful part, and the reason that this isn’t a sad story.

I didn’t stay effed up.

There is no rational explanation for why I’m still here.  There is no rational explanation for the fact that our marriage isn’t just rescued–it’s amazing, and has been for nearly a decade now.  There’s no rational explanation for the fact that I’m a productive, respected creative professional who functions just fine without medication.  There’s no rational explanation for the truly amazing man I have watched my husband become over the past eight years.  Or that we have two healthy, confident kids who are thriving despite junior high angst and kindergarten drama.

There’s no rational explanation for the fact that my mom and I worked out our issues a year before she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  There’s no rational explanation for the healing that’s taken place between me and the family I grew up in.  There’s no rational explanation for the trusting, strong friendships I have with other women.

We have left black and white Kansas behind, people.  Welcome to the technicolor Oz of the kingdom of heaven, where anything is possible.

In the middle of the Book of Job, apropos of nothing, Job says “I know that my redeemer lives.”  It’s the king of all Old Testament non-sequiturs.

I get that, now. I get how, in the middle of the whirlwind, you find a peace you can’t explain, because it’s beyond all understanding.  Like  fake hair in an aerosol spray can, it’s not natural.  But in a good way.

Chris and I submitted our applications in to begin training in gospel counseling last week.  In the words of 2 Corinthians, we want to comfort others with the comfort we’ve received.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

Thanks for reading.

In the French house, we are old school reality television junkies from way back.  We watched the first season of Survivor and American Idol, and more recently we’ve found ourselves getting sucked into Undercover Boss, The Biggest Loser and Extreme Home Makeover.

While I understand the appeal of these shows, I wonder if they don’t contribute to the culture of wishful thinking that permeates American society.   The idea that some television show will pluck you out of obscurity and fix the problems in your home, your waistline, and your career is understandably attractive.

img "couch potato" courtesy MJimages on sxc

But when it comes to the problems in your life, dreaming of rescue isn’t going to get you any closer to resolution.

I’m not discounting the role of providence and serendipity in personal transformation, here.   In fact, quite the opposite. My experience as a veteran daydream believer and semi-professional damsel-in-distress has shown me that those daydreams and rescue fantasies actually distract you from recognizing the real opportunities for change that providence places right in front of you.

We live in a world that is permeated by a presence that wants to see you transformed into a being capable of extreme, radical love and compassion.  Opportunities to fix the broken things in your life are literally everywhere.  And the lengths that we go to in order to avoid seeing and being forced to respond to those opportunities border on the ridiculous.

I try to balance the personal transformation posts here between gentle encouragement and loving kicks in the pants.  Today is a kick in the pants day.

Turn off the television.  Stop fiddling with the stupid car stereo.  Quit sniping about the fact that the restaurant messed up your order again.

Lift up your head.  Look around.  Look for something, while holding an open mind about what that something might be.

The view may take your breath away.  I know it has for me on several occasions lately.

I was thinking yesterday about reality shows, and what a misnomer that term is, since like Vegas, everything about a reality show is contrived and unreal.  My husband is a big fan of NBC’s The Biggest Loser, and we both are sporadic watchers of Survivor.  Both of these shows are transparently inauthentic in that they’re designed to create a “plot” from unscripted behavior, and the end result is that they’re force to more or less script a lot of what’s done and said in their respective environments.  Very little feels true to life in these heightened realities.

But it’s got me thinking.   Because I do think people have genuine, real transformative experiences on reality shows.  Maybe all that contrivance pushes some people to dig deeper and connect with what actually is real and genuine about themselves. Maybe it causes some to seek out and actively pursue their own souls, for fear of losing them in that environment.

A conference like BlogWorldExpo is also a rather unreal, heightened environment.  The famous, infamous, web-famous, and anonymous are all congregated here based on mutual need.  There are parties and there is excess.  There is the bizarre spectacle of cewebrity on full display. There is the awkward dance of relationships that heretofore have only existed on the ethereal plane of social media having to figure out how to survive a face-to-face meeting.

I think I am in the midst of a little transformative experience myself, here in this unreal environment.

(Another attendee here, a lady who is as cute as a button wearing a “FREE HUGS” t-shirt, just came up to me and offered me a free hug.  I accepted. See? Unreal.)

Almost exactly eight years ago, I had an experience that forces me to reevaluate who I thought I was, at a very basic level.  I couldn’t keep being who I thought I was, so I spent some time “trying on” different aspects of different identities for a very long time.  Eventually, things stabilized, but I think what I’ve been realizing over the last few weeks is that things stabilized too much.  They stabilized to the point of creating a rigid, inflexible and woefully incomplete understanding of who I am.

I stopped exploring who I might become.

A year and a half ago, I made a decision that even I didn’t see coming.  When everyone else was expecting me to zig, I zagged.  The really alarming thing is, even I didn’t see that decision coming.  In fact, not two weeks prior, I had told someone with a great deal of confidence that I would never make that particular choice.

And then I did.

It weirded me out.  I thought I knew who I was, but the person I thought I was wouldn’t have made that decision.  I’ve spent the better part of a year and a half now, trying to figure out the implications of that.

Now, in the midst of this weird conference, in the midst of an even weirder city, where nothing is quite what it seems, I’m am inexplicably getting a lot of clarity.  I am digging deeper and examining my soul, and finding there was WAY more to it, more to the real me, than I ever realized.

Well, kiddos, I gotta grab some lunch.  Back down the rabbit hole.  I’ll send more missives through the looking glass, if you like.

If you’ve got a parallel story of getting real in the midst of unreality to share, drop me a comment.  It may take me a bit to moderate, but it’ll get through.

Free digital hugs from me: (((((((reader friends)))))))