30
Saying Yes

This is how I say yes to the life at hand.

I wake up each morning and I go downstairs. I open the blinds and watch the sun stream into my living room window as it rises in the east. This is a prerequisite for living: windows that face east and west. Sunrises and sunsets.

I brew my first cup of coffee and crack the windows. I like to listen to the birds as they wake the world up.

I go to the front porch. I breathe deep. And all this in a house that doesn’t belong to me. In a rental condo. Imagine that. I have come to terms with it. So I’m not a homeowner and I have a bad credit score because of one year in my life that beat us up and spit us out financially. A theft, car accident, daughter’s surgery, and ravaging fire will do that. Who cares? I just don’t anymore. I have a front porch and windows facing east and west. My daughter sleeps in a room she loves. And the walls of the place we call home right now are a testament to a life lived deep and wide. A life of dreams, detours, and rebirth that created a life worth living and a story worth telling. Does anything else truly matter?

I don’t look at the empty spots on the calendar—where tour schedules used to dominate—with negativity. I look at empty spots on the calendar and smile. Shall Annie and I play in the leaves or paint? Will I write a story, a blog post, or a card to my grandma? Will I sing to a room of high school girls or teach a songwriting class? I’m no longer interested in what was; I am only interested in what will become. Of course, there are moments when a voice tries to creep in and remind me of long-gone dreams and plans and tries to bid me come and feel sorry for myself. And some days I do. I cry and pout and walk around in a firestorm of anger. I call it re-grieving. And re-grieving is totally acceptable. But I am learning that these moments of re-grief are less and less about the actual dreams I buried and more about the current state I find myself in. I long for my days to count. Long for a life rich in friends, family, faith, and fearlessness. It’s when I feel my current days are coming up short that I am most tempted to believe that my buried dreams would have delivered the life results I wanted. Sure, there are tiny moments I grieve what was, but more than that, I am aching for meaning now.

These days, I remember that the answer is not behind me; it is in front of me. It is in this very moment. And God seems to constantly be inviting me to say yes to the life in front of me. The words of God to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 30 are on a constant reel in my mind.

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it. See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. . . . Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.1

God’s daily invitation to choose life is always before me, prodding me to say yes to the moment at hand. So I live simply and with purpose. How can I love my next-door neighbor well today? This is hard, because she has five dogs that bark all the time and I hate barking dogs. But I am learning to say yes to even her place in my life. In this new season of life, I am practicing my yes. I say yes to making space, making lunches, making new friends, making a solo album that my record label is confident will make a big impact. I call the album The Becoming. Of course! I pour my heart and soul into it. Songs for people who are burying, being lost, waiting, and becoming new. Songs to remind people that God shows up on this road to becoming. It releases in the spring of 2013 and doesn’t sell a hundred thousand copies or top any type of radio charts. In fact, radio doesn’t play the radio single, there are no tour offers, and I barely sell 5,000 albums. I’ve sold more boxes of Girl Scout cookies than this. The people who once partnered with me in the music industry have to move on because I’m not commercially successful as a solo artist. My record label and publishing house of eight years drop me from their rosters.

But I still say yes. Yes to faithfully championing these songs of holy becoming. This is not failure; this is living. And I have lived long enough to know that dreams, goals, partnerships, people, plans, and passions come and go. Change is constant and learning to live with open hands is the best gift I can give myself, my family, and my God. Saying yes to the moment at hand is my only commodity. In this season new life looks like valuing the moment at hand more than the broken dreams of the past or the happily-ever-afters of the future. New life looks like being faithful in the little things.

Mark Buchanan describes this type of living in his transformative book The Rest of God: “I used to think the spiritual life was mostly about finding and using our gifts for God’s glory—my utmost for his highest. More and more, I think it is not this, not first, not most. At root, the spiritual life consists in choosing the way of littleness.”2

Toward the end of my time in Addison Road, I remember sipping coffee and talking with a wildly respected woman who walks with artists in their personal and artistic lives. I told her how tired I was. Depleted and empty. She asked me if God needed me to be a martyr, to work myself into the ground with travel and music and making art. And I will never forget what came next: “Would God be just as pleased if you moved into a little cottage on a lake somewhere and spent your days listening to birds, praising Him for His creation, attending to your family and your own soul?”

I was appalled. Of course God would mind. I had a gift, a calling! My utmost for His highest was in high demand! The idea of living little seemed wasteful; it wasn’t a part of the dream.

Thinking back to that conversation, I know the groundwork was being laid for where I am now. As if she meant to say, “One day you will choose what is best for you. You will choose life that you may live. And that may mean saying yes to a different type of road. A new type of dream.”

On the road to becoming I realized that the dream, with its grandiose happily-ever-after, only lasts for a brief moment. Dreams are hard-earned, short-lived, and always leave us wanting more. Mountaintops are a small part of our journeys; they are not the whole of our existence or the only moments that matter in a life. Annie Dillard says it best: “I have never understood why so many mystics of all creeds experience the presence of God on mountaintops. Aren’t they afraid of being blown away?”3 Truth is, we look for God on mountaintops when God might be just as pleased to meet us at a cottage by the lake, in the minivan, on the golf course, or in our living rooms doing everyday life. But run-of-the-mill living has been replaced with a modern notion that everyone has to be famous, inventive, world-changing, and grandiose. This is just exhausting.

Saying yes and choosing life doesn’t look the same in every season. Sometimes it absolutely happens on a mountaintop. But most of life happens in the mundane, not on the mountaintops. This side of heaven, life unfolds in valleys, deserts, long lines, commutes, quiet cottages by the lake, around the table, and on flat land—rich with friendship and fertile soil. We shed skin, lie dormant, and regenerate as all living, breathing things must do. This isn’t high-altitude living.

So how do you say yes to the moment of becoming at hand? Embrace the ordinary. Welcome it into your life and be satisfied with the seemingly insignificant moments at hand. After grieving, burying, lostness, and waiting, embracing the ordinary is an exercise in rediscovering the beauty of living.

These days I am faithful to little things. The end of my movie? It’s not a cinematic masterpiece, the make-believe kind with happily-ever-afters that you watch on the big screen. But I know now that it was never supposed to be. The lady who walks with artists knew what I didn’t. She knew that gifts and callings change shape, and some seasons are best spent tending to the cottage so the soul can be renewed and restored. Living in the way of littleness, a way that doesn’t demand my martyrdom, is how I say yes to Jesus these days.

I love my husband and I love my daughter. I try to make their lives more rich and beautiful. I go to parks and take pictures of Annie’s newest creations. I cook dinner. Well, I try to cook dinner. I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that people cook. Every. Single. Day. I check in on my sisters and my family. I nurture friendships. I write the stories of beauty and redemption that I see unfolding around me. I play.

So what of the dream? The one conjured up all those years ago in the magnolia tree, when all of life was attentive to my whim and whimsy?

Maybe the dream comes to fruition or perhaps it crashes and burns. Maybe a new dream springs up. One so deep and wide and beyond my wildest expectations that I have won the proverbial lottery of dreams. Or maybe I find myself somewhere in between.

It doesn’t matter.

The end of the story isn’t dependent on the state of the dream.

The end of the story isn’t about answers and prosperity and happily-ever-afters.

The end of the story is about something more rich and beautiful and constant than dreams, which are here today and gone tomorrow. The end of the story is about living whatever the story is well.

I think it looks a little more like being brave enough to take one step after the other. To keep going. To keep becoming. To allow the cycle to play out. To refuse to bury my head in the sand and ignore reality. To refuse to cling to the past, turning down my much-needed burial rights. My life is more about stepping into the lostness than stepping into happily-ever-after. Knowing and trusting that in the lost and waiting, new life is being uncovered and stumbled upon. I am becoming. And I am not alone. In a mysterious way that I will never understand, God is with me.

The end of the story looks less like an earth-answer and more like Jesus. Jesus doesn’t say, “Come to me, all ye who are weary, and I will give you an answer.” He says, “Come to me, all ye who are weary, and I will give you rest.”4 We have not been called to answers. We have been called to Jesus. And it’s maddening, really. When Jesus was asked questions by the religious people, who so desperately wanted Jesus to lay out black-and-white answers, He would often answer by asking more questions.

Who are you, Jesus?

Who do you say I am?

Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

What is written in the law? How do you read it?

Who is my neighbor?

Which of these do you think was a neighbor to the man?

We crave clear-cut answers, but God insists on relationship. God asks us questions because, Mark Buchanan says, “Nothing hooks us and pries us open quite like a question. You can talk all day at me, yet it obliges me nothing. I can listen or not, respond or not. But ask me one question, and I must answer or rupture our fellowship. God’s inquisitiveness, His seeming curiosity, is a measure of His intimate nature. He desires relationship.”5

Sometimes we have more questions than answers. An empty canvas is hard for the overworked, overstimulated, overcommitted person to accept. Cottages and the way of littleness? No thanks. But could it be, when Jesus says to pick up our cross and follow Him, He means to follow Him into the backwardness of it all? Detours, unbecoming moments, map-less ways through wastelands. Life abundant coming from the least likely places—is this what it means to follow Jesus? Journeying down our road to becoming with full faith that burying, lostness, and waiting are gateways to new life.

These days I get the feeling that the way of the cross is less concerned with answers and more concerned with Jesus. Not Plan A, Plan B, Plan F. Not happily-ever-after. Not even concrete answers. Just an empty canvas, a new day, and saying yes to the holy unknown. Saying yes to new life, unexpected joys, and unknown roads. These days I don’t have a five-year plan or even a five-month plan. There is no map and I live with open hands. The heartbeat and prayer that guides our family now is alarmingly simple.

We wake up each new day and say yes.

Yes to being a part of God’s story.

I am learning to live without a map, which is good, because the road to becoming is map-less. All I need is a Guide who knows the way to the other side. No matter how many times the road changes. How many times it veers and turns, switches and cuts back. If I am still in the middle of this unknown, messy, redemptive journey alongside Jesus, then my becoming is bearable—beautiful, even.

With every unexpected detour, my prayer is this: May new life begin to take root and grow, even now, as I bury the road behind me, sit blindly in my lostness, and wait for holy hunches. May I reach the end of this detour in awe and wonder—marveling at blossoms that have pushed through soil and earth to become. And may God send spaghetti angels, choirs singing their “He shall reigns,” shovels, and Cracker Barrel rescues all along the way.

Because I am a part of God’s story, no matter what road I find myself on:

it is well

and all shall be well

and all manner of thing shall be well.