20
Losing My Humanity

Annie spent her first Christmas morning on planet earth in a Motel 6 with scratchy bedsheets, questionable carpet, and no presents, Christmas tree, or extended family. This is not a proper way for a baby to spend her first Christmas. Unless of course it is the baby born in a stable with cows and hay, coming into the world all humble-like in order to make a point that will forever change history. But my kid isn’t Jesus, so I was hoping for a little more than a barn or Motel 6.

She was only eight months old and had no idea it was Christmas. But I did. She would not care if she woke up at The Plaza or in a cardboard box. But I cared. I wanted to be around the Christmas tree with family, wearing cheesy matching pajamas and taking horribly awkward holiday photos. At the very least I would have chosen to wake up in the quietness of our own home, drinking real coffee. But there I was on Christmas Eve in Motel 6, drinking deplorable coffee and splitting the Christmas cookies intended for my in-laws with the couple who hitchhiked a ride with us. Yes, there were hitchhikers, of sorts, involved.

Christmas Eve day was spent with my parents in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It snowed and Annie wore a furry reindeer costume. We took cute pictures, opened gifts, said our goodbyes, and flew back home to Dallas without a single hiccup. It was a perfect beginning to our daughter’s first Christmas. But once we landed in Dallas it was a different story. De-icing crews met us on the ground and passengers dialed their families to grimly discuss the possibility of being stranded at the airport. In the baggage claim area, dazed drivers burrowed under layers of coats, looking as though they had just braved the harrowing arctic tundra to turn up safely at the airport. By the looks of it, we appeared to be arriving during the height of an ice apocalypse. And as a true Texan, I take ice apocalypses very seriously.

You cannot base the severity of ice storms in Central Texas on the reaction of its residents or media personalities. I know, I grew up there. People in Dallas, Texas, react to snow and ice as if a nuclear meltdown has been announced. We cancel school. Immediately. We run to the store for basics because God only knows how long the ice storm might confine us to our homes. Grocery stores run out of water bottles and propane tanks. We inch along the roadways. Inchy. Inch. Hazard lights blinking, both hands firmly on the steering wheel, telling the kids in the backseat to shut up and pray as we traverse those roads of death. We may not win our football games, but Dallas certainly knows how to do up an ice storm.

So that night I told Ryan I thought we should just slowly, inch by inch, make our way to our home, five miles away from the airport. We could try the hour-long drive to his parents’ house in the morning, once the ice melted. I told him I thought his parents would understand if we showed up on Christmas Day and that sleeping in our own bed sounded nicer anyway. “We should wait,” I said. He smiled his hardheaded smile and I knew what was coming.

The problem with my husband is that he thinks he can do anything. Watching the Olympics with him is the most exasperating part of our marriage. The Olympic swimmers come on and he laughs. “I could do that,” he says with feigned arrogance. And I tell him, “No. No you couldn’t.” He shrugs back and says with a smirk, “Oh sure I could. That’s easy,” and I get so annoyed. SO annoyed. I quip back argumentatively, “You do realize you have to train for these types of things? You can’t just get in the water one day and do that.” But he insists he could. He can do anything he wants, he says. Run a half marathon, just like so-and-so. Fix the toilet, just like so-and-so. Hike the Himalayas, just like so-and-so. Write a novel. Excel at men’s gymnastics. Flip a house. He can do it all, including drive through late-night ice storms like he is from Minnesota and not Dallas. Sometimes I want to strangle him.

“Seriously, Jen, it’s just ice. I can get us there,” he says as the TVs in the airport blare road-hazard warnings and breaking-ice-news-updates . . . he says as the de-icing guys spray down the plane . . . he says as we watch the arctic-tundra-dazed people come in from the storm and wait for family members in the baggage claim area.

We pile in the car with our eight-month-old baby, suitcases, and Christmas presents, and leave the airport for the hour-long drive to his parents’ house.

For over an hour we slip and slide across the highway, past car wrecks and jackknifed eighteen-wheelers. With twenty miles to go, we see warning signs that the highway has been completely shut down. But no worries—Ryan knows a side road that will get us there. Of course he does! The side road is a dark, hilly country road with no houses and no people. It only takes us five minutes before we get stuck and are officially stranded in the middle of nowhere. I am furious.

As we sit in the car trying to figure out what to do next, I see the shadow of a man walking toward our car. “Great,” I say in a snarky voice, “now we’re going to be murdered too.” I instruct Ryan not to roll down the window. He rolls down his window. The man is frantically waving his arms as he approaches our car. He is stuck too. In fact, he has been stuck in the same place for so long that he is now out of gas and has a dead battery. His girlfriend and their newborn baby are in the car and they don’t have cell phone service. And nobody else has been STUPID enough to drive down this road. They were freezing cold and becoming desperate. They were so glad to see us. We were their Christmas angels, he said.

Together, Ryan and the other guy jostle our car out of the ice. We mamas strap both babies into the backseat and I sit between them quietly singing carol-lullabies. The new couple, the snow hitchhikers, sit together in the front seat of the car, the woman on her boyfriend’s lap. They reek of cigarette smoke and their baby cries incessantly. We make our way to the Motel 6. Inch by inch. They wonder aloud if the motel will let them stay in the lobby until morning. They don’t have any money. We let our family know what has happened as soon as we get cell service, and when we get to the Motel 6 two rooms are already paid for. I split up the Christmas cookies I made for Santa Claus and give them to the young couple. We go to our separate rooms with our baby girls for their first Christmas Eves.

Christmas morning looks like stale coffee, overprocessed pastries, and scratchy bedsheets. I smile as the sun beams through the window and my sweet baby girl makes her tiny gurgling noises against my chest. Ryan smiles as if to say, “See, it worked out after all!” and I give him the death stare. The best death stare I can use in good conscience on such a holy day. “We should have waited.”

“I know,” he says, looking truly sorry. “We should have waited.” We smile at each other. After a year of fire, theft, and hitchhiking up the highway toward Cracker Barrel, spending Christmas morning with snow hitchhikers at the Motel 6 felt right.

We leave the Motel 6 and head for my in-laws’ house—and arrive twenty short minutes later. The ice had all melted and the roads were back to normal. Imagine that. While I am grateful we found ourselves stranded on that back road and the subsequent Christmas miracle that happened, I am more grateful for the lesson it taught Ryan and me about waiting. When I think about that night five years later, what stands out is the brief moment Ryan looked at me with a bit of fear and regret and said, “We should have waited.”

There have been so many moments in my life when I should have waited. But I hate waiting. I think it is the hardest part of the entire journey. The destruction of a dream is cruel. The burying is deeply painful. Lostness is maddening. But the waiting? Pure. Torture.

On my road to becoming, I realized how much easier it was for me to make peace with seasons of destruction, loss, and grief versus seasons of waiting. When I was lost, there was nowhere for me to go. I could accept that concrete nothingness. But once I started getting glimpses of new life on the horizon and possible directions I might move into, it was all over. I felt frantic to get there already. It felt like the delirious insanity that overtakes you on a long car ride when you have waited to relieve yourself—patiently and without panic, but then you turn the corner onto the road where the toilet is waiting for you and lose your humanity. You CANNOT hold it anymore. You are done. You have made it so far! Your bladder has performed at such superior levels! But as soon as that toilet is in sight your body lets down all defenses and you turn into a urine-crazed human with full-on twitches, audible moans, and a frightening level of concentration and deep breathing. Ladies, you know what I’m talking about. The mad dash that follows is an embarrassing, spastic sprint toward the toilet. And I think that is sort of what waiting feels like for me.

I have come so far! I have dreamed big and watched as those dreams unraveled. I have buried and thoroughly given myself over to being lost and plan-less. But now I see a light at the end of the tunnel. New life is beginning to take shape and I have enough hope to think, for the first time in a long time, that I might have a few more dreams in me after all. Everything inside of me wants to take off in a sprint—a mad dash to the proverbial toilet at the end of the road. As if I should be exempt through this final season of waiting and granted full permission to race toward the finish line! But running fast gives me leg cramps, and chest pain, and sometimes incredibly uncomfortable wedgies.

Who wants to come into new life—the one you have fought so hard for—panting for air, with leg cramps, sprinting like a urine-crazed woman trying to find a toilet at the end of a long road trip? No thank you.

I want to finish well—and finishing well means having the patience to wait when waiting is required. Just because I can see new life on the horizon doesn’t mean it is time for that new life yet. During seasons of waiting, dreams are growing up. That anything can be planted and then sprout, grow, and bloom is holy. Sprinting to the finish line only shortchanges dreams that need divine time to come to life.

In his powerful book on rest, author Mark Buchanan says, “In God’s economy, to redeem time, you might just have to waste some.”1 Time wasting is not real high on my agenda. It’s one thing to sit still when you have nowhere to go but an entirely different thing to sit still when you see the place you are headed—so, so close, closer than it’s ever been—and yet hear the voice that says, Wait. Not just yet. Give it time to grow. Almost.

Almost? Don’t almost me! I’ve been almost-ing for a year now and I am done with it already! I don’t want to waste a second more.

Waiting feels like wasting time to me. It is nearly impossible to walk through the season of waiting if you are driven, anxious, money-hungry, detail-oriented, a doer, a fixer, a mover, a shaker, a hustler, an income provider, or suffering from ADD. I can attest to many of those. Waiting stands in stark contrast to the human spirit of accomplishment and forward progress. It requires restraint and discipline. It calls for uncanny patience, trust, and hope. Hope that you can wait confidently and not in vain. My dad always quoted Psalm 27:13 when we were growing up: “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.” I knew Dad wasn’t talking about God giving him fancy cars or helping him win the lottery; it wasn’t that kind of goodness. Instead, he was talking about a faithful God who delights in walking alongside His children and refuses to leave them—even in their seasons of waiting. A God who sees people through to the other side. The poet David, who wrote the words above, also penned these: “If I make my home in the most isolated part of the ocean, even then You will be there to guide me; Your right hand will embrace me, for You are always there.”2 When I confidently trust that God is near and in the business of finishing what He started, I can wait with hope.

Letting new dreams grow and fully develop might mean you have to waste time in order to fully grow, fully become. It is counterintuitive to all that we’ve been taught: namely, that we can have what we want when we want it if we buy it, do it, fix it, make it, or try hard enough. Voila! Instant gratification. Unfortunately, this rhythm and pace do not translate well within the journey of the human soul. Very rarely does rushing something have a good outcome. To be sure, there is grace along the way when we sprint and should really just be standing still. But the outcome remains the same. A rushed life bears the scars of our impatience. And all too often I am quick to choose scars over meaningful pauses and holy seasons of waiting. That’s how you end up at Motel 6 on Christmas morning instead of in your own bed with your own Christmas tree. In Sue Monk Kidd’s defining spiritual memoir, When the Heart Waits, she says this about waiting: “There’s a third way to have a crisis: the way of waiting. That way means creating a painfully honest and contemplative relationship with one’s own depths, with God in the deep center of one’s soul. People who choose this way aren’t so much after peace of mind or justice as wholeness and transformation. They’re after soul-making.”3

The journey of soul-making requires that we wait. Waiting is the lynchpin.