Tag Archives: community

A Friend for the End ~ Link-Up {Take Heart…in Kinship and Community}

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Today in our Take Heart series, my friend Christie Elkins shares about how she felt God’s comfort even as she and her family watched their church crumble after almost a decade of ministry.

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I exited the door, turned left, my worn ballet flats sliding slightly on the waxed floor. I scooted to a pause, for a moment. I had no idea which way to turn. It was then she grabbed my hand and showed me the way. Holding my breath, I followed blindly.

That was the end.

The beginning was almost eight years prior. Fresh out of college, newlyweds, we were seeking a place to worship with no abandon—a come as you are, a welcoming smile, a deep conversation about sin on a moldy secondhand couch. Despite the bugs, the dust, and the scratching of heads in the community, we went full force with a group of believers and launched a church in an old building on a forgotten side of town.

They said we were too young, too loud, wore too much black.

That was the beginning.

What transpired over the years to come was unexpected. It was fulfilling yet lonely. It was open arms or cold shoulders. It was encouragement in the most unlikely of places. It was the building up of lifelong friendships. Or the ones that got away who have not spoken since. It was worship with the sunrise, gospel sharing overseas, loving people at home. And still finding bugs here and there.

It was a whirlwind courtship between the Maker and his clay. He molded us. Changed us. Made us whole. Gave us direction.

They said we were too busy, too scattered, and had too many kids.

We visited a church. A different church. We had never sought out a church before– it seemed one always found us, especially with my husband being in the ministry. It was awkward. And uncomfortable. And when my daughter said she had to go to the bathroom, I jumped at the chance to exit the service.

So, I exited the door, turned left, my worn ballet flats sliding slightly on the waxed floor. I scooted to a pause, for a moment. I had no idea which way to turn. It was then she grabbed my hand and showed me the way. Holding my breath, I followed blindly. “The bathrooms are this way”, she smiled, and guided me down a long, shiny school hallway, with fluorescent lighting blazing into my eyes.

I gripped her hand tightly, fighting back tears. At that moment, the only friend I had, the only encouragement in ministry was my five year old child.

Everything is beautiful in its time. From the first moment of cracking open that dust filled building to the painful service where we stepped down from an eight year life of church ministry. There was a time—a time, a purpose, a place in His plan for the astounding things that happened over the course of those years. And while most would expect the closing to be hurtful and cold, it was not.

Because what we had with these believers is hard to explain. It transcends time. It defies odds. Because that is what happens when you allow faith to take its course. It does not have to make sense to anyone but Him. So you hold on to that tiny, sweaty, five year old hand, take a deep breath, and trust.

We are all headed in the same direction, we are just taking different hallways. We are going forth. Ready. Prepared. And as He guides our paths, we need not seek a friend for the end.

Those friends have been there all along.

Christie ElkinsChristie is the mother of three rambunctious little ones, wife to a pastor/cop, and a writer to anyone who will offer a listening ear. She began her blog, My Walk With Eden in 2008 and spends her days trying to homeschool, paint her nails, and save the world, all before naptime. Christie is also a newspaper columnist at the LaFollette Press, sharing weekly, humorous tales in her column entitled “Letters from the Nest,” and is an Allume blog contributor. She and her family reside in the Appalachian mountains of east Tennessee, where sweet tea is served at every meal and hospitality is second nature.
You can find Christie on Twitter, on Facebook , her blog, and LaFollette Press.

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Take Heart Series ~ Feb 2013Now it’s time to share YOUR Take Heart story. Enter your information below to link to your own blog post on how you’ve been encouraged to “Take Heart…in Kinship and Community,” whether it be in the struggle of extended family dysfunction, leaving a church, or working through conflict with a friend. In your post, link back to our page here (you’re welcome to grab the thumbnail graphic to use in your post) and invite others to join in. Then, be sure to visit and comment on the posts that link up before and after yours and encourage each other!



If the Tee Fits: The (in)RL Beach House Is Back Again

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I hadn’t payed much attention to what I was wearing yesterday morning. I had rolled out of bed in my pajamas and stayed in them after sending my son off to school. But when I opened my browser to enter my details in little boxes for the second go ‘round of (in)courage’s worldwide meet-up, I looked down and noticed the letters sticking out in 3D over my expanding belly. Screen print stretched on the comfiest of cotton and lycra with the word (in)RL.

I’ve loved the (in)courage community since I first found my way there through Ann Voskamp’s blog. All of these likeminded women full of creativity and wisdom, I saw them gather together at the beach house for their (in)courage writers’ retreat. When I first saw those pictures and read their reflections, I was writing alone…no one to bounce ideas off of, no venue for sharing, no one near who fully resonated with my attraction to expressing ideas in the written word.

Then, I got invited to the beach house…or, rather, the beach house came to me. I went to (in)RL last year knowing one college friend out of a whole table full of women. But the introductions that day spring-boarded relationships that made my online life feel less virtual and more 3D, like the letters on my tee turned materni-tee, like the (in)courage ladies at the beach house talking out loud over the sound of waves, showing emotion in facial expressions instead of emoticons.

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Since that meet-up last April, several of us local bloggers have continued to meet at cafes or schedule summer play dates with the kids in tow. We have helped each other roll out of bed in the morning, encouragement that I desperately needed when exhaustion and morning sickness tried to keep my eyes closed past the alarm clock this fall. We attended Influence together and widened our circle to new locals. And this winter, I’ve pulled up a chair to the lovely classics book club I kept hearing so much about.

Now, when we see each other on-line, we know the voice behind the words, the face behind the avatar.

Things look a little different for me this spring than the last. This expanding belly means I’m trading one happy event for another. Our third little one is scheduled to arrive the very week of the Wiley family’s annual trip down to Ft. Myers, the beach tradition Grandpa and Grandma Wiley started back in 1957.

While we’ll miss being part of the yearly fun in the sun in early April, I will be happily sidetracked with the warmth of a baby girl curled on my chest. And then a few weeks later, I’ll be taking her along to the “beach house” all the same. Thanks, (in)courage, for bringing it back in all it’s casual comfiness. I’ve grown a bit since last year, but the (in)RL T-shirt still fits.

{Did you take part in (in)RL last year? What was your experience like? Register here to take part in your own local (in)RL experience.}

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Don’t Lose the Sweets {Preserve Your Story ~ Day 15}

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It’s a neighborhood masquerade. Little characters toddle from their homes and gather all at once along sidewalks. We marvel at ninja moves, watch Robin Hood pull back his bow, and learn the trick of dodging the light saber. We tote around little Leia, keeping her warm beyond the braids twirled in place to make convenient earmuffs. No matter the shivers, she nods yes for more treats.

Our words come out funny through half-frozen lips, but we talk anyway and feel the warmth of this door-to-door festival. We laugh at a friend barreling down the hill on his son’s stroller. We tousle the fur of the prodigal Bichons who slept in a stranger’s house last week. Another neighbor caters to us parents, ladeling cups of hot apple cider and telling us about the arches in the window woodwork more than a century old. And then there’s our aging neighbor across the street given two days to live after a drunk driver bruised her heart. Here she was last night, months after the accident, handing out candy.

These are the treats to me. My children open up their bags for chocolate bars and lemon drops. I open up for this– these little bits of story handed out in my own neighborhood. They are the richness of scene and character, whether I use them in my writing or not. But I’d rather keep these little bits than lose them. If I don’t, I’m like a trick-or-treater with a hole in my candy bucket. The sweets fall out and trail behind, left to the raccoons.

Whether in the moment or at the end of the day, I take time to record a brief memory cue or one-liner at the bottom of my planner page. Sometimes I record a bit on the iTalk app on my phone. Sometimes I snap a picture of an inspiring object or scene and share it on Instagram or store it in my private One Thousand Gifts app.

You can carry a small leatherbound book (dated or blank) like Hemingway did. You can ramble your findings on your phone or gather them in a photo stream with a good caption. But make sure that somehow, some way, you’re taking notes or you’ll likely find yourself back home empty, a sad-faced kid with nothing much to chew on.

{Have you been taking notes to give yourself something to work with later? How can you make it more convenient to gather the bits of story handed out in your everyday? Do you prefer the old-school or high tech options?}

This is Day 15 of my series 31 Days ~ Preserve Your Story, linking up with The Nester’s annual 31 Days of Change.

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31 Days ~ Preserve Your Story

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Chances are today you’ve been scattering bits of your life’s setting and scene out for friends to read in the form of status updates and tweets. You are writing, and sharing, but soon after you do, the pieces slip to the bottom of the newsfeed, like scraps of dinner funneled into the disposal.

Behind those snippets and snapshots, though, there is a story worth preserving. And to capture it in full flavor and substance, you’ve got to write on.

This October, I’m inviting you to join me for my series Preserving Your Story, part of The Nester’s annual 31 Days link-up. In my 31 posts, we will cover:

  1. Reasons to preserve: everything from writing in an attitude of self-reflection that nourishes your everyday life to penning down unforgettables for future generations
  2. What to preserve: pulling out a story from scribbles, snippets and snapshots of your everyday mercies and the rarer moments of wide-eyed wonder
  3. How to prepare: methods you can use in taking notes on the story unfolding around you
  4. Proper preserving: good techniques, tools and containers for bringing your story from first draft to publishable blog post, magazine article or even printed book

Even while we’re talking about preserving YOUR story, it’s a joy to know that writing doesn’t have to be a solitary activity. We get creative sparks as we observe and interact with the people around us. We carve out some time alone to write our thoughts. Then, we find opportunity to share the beginnings of a work with an inner circle of friends, hearing their feedback and relishing their stories as they respond and share. Finally, when the work is ready for a wider audience, new friends surface and find themselves all the more brave to share their story because you shared yours first. I hope you’ll join in the community here during this series and spur one another on in preserving worthy stories.

This is Day 1. See all posts in the series here.

{How are you doing with preserving your story? In what areas do you need the most help/encouragement?}

P.S. Thanks for bearing with me as I get going on my 31 Days series. My computer went kaput on October 1 and I’m coming in a little later than I expected. :)

Beyond Little Droplets…(in)RL

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In little droplets we give and get. 140 characters or less do their best to articulate the everyday mercy, the wide-eyed wonder, the treasure in the earthen vessel @thismoment. Maybe an instagr.am is like a thousand words; or maybe it’s more like a cave drawing, a chalky sketch that leaves us wanting for details. We can’t write a blog post more than 500 words if we actually want someone to read it. We reel in one-liner comments on Facebook. We txt instead of call, shorten r words 2 get a quick point across, think there must be an emergency when the phone actually rings. Always little droplets.

“We are tempted to think that our little ‘sips’ of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation,” psychologist Sherry Turkle said in a recent New York Times article, “But they don’t…. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters.”

Too long we go thirsty with the dribble from the virtual faucet. A couple of weeks ago, I penciled an entry in my journal at the end of the night. “To go to sleep satisfied,” I wrote, “it is too rare a thing. But I have the gift of it tonight….” I had spent the morning cleaning to make the house ready for an old friend to visit. Around noon, we toasted some sandwiches, filled our cups with cold water and then I listened as she poured out the whole story of what she’d been through the last few years, a plot-line I could have never deciphered from the little blurbs she’d shared in virtual world. That evening, after I taught a lesson for eager English language-learners, I came right home and tapped out long paragraphs to point her to the Word at the beginning, the Word that spoke over the surface of the waters.

That same Word, now made flesh, spoke over the waters again when he asked an outcast of a woman for a drink from the well. Many of us have our reasons to guard ourselves from community, to give and get in little sips. Turkle continued, “[We] use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right…. Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to [mere] connection is part of this.”

But notice what happens here in front of the well. In face-to-face conversation with Jesus, this woman has no way to make herself presentable. She is found out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her run home and bolt the door shut, further cutting herself off from the world. Instead, the woman runs into town, toward community and brings the crowd back to the Living Water. When Holley Gerth mentioned the concept of “fitting in vs. belonging” on an inRL video Friday night, I grabbed the pen fast, scribbled down the words and wrote down the author’s name. Brené Brown’s written words speak so well to this story: “We can only belong when we offer our most authentic selves and when we’re embraced for who we are.”

On Saturday morning, I ventured out in real life, breathed in the cold damp, sloshed through drizzles without an umbrella. At the door of the bistro, I met the bold smell of coffee brewing. I walked around the hostess counter toward the back of the place. When I came near, I saw the centerpiece of the room, a table full of women, not just “apparitions flickering on the screen,” but flesh and bone and audible word. One looked up, met my eyes, not looking past, and waved for me to come on over. There in the middle of it all was one chair open, saved just for me. Across the table, one woman clinked a flask on another’s glass, pouring water, quenching thirst for community.

{Thanks to (in)courage for getting the ball rolling, bringing together groups of wordsmiths, fostering a sense of belonging and true community that is “seeded online and grows off line.” This weekend, I was blessed to “belong” with the women of The Tiny Twig, 4tunate, Seasoned Joy, Simply Sarah, Hot Fudge Sundae Life, The Barela Family, Only Here-Only Now, James Gang, and Snail Pace Transformations. And I would love for you to join me in real life on Saturday, May 19 as I lead worship for the Fully Satisfied Women’s Conference where we will meditate on living life beyond little droplets!}