Given the state of my body these days you might not believe it, but I’ve climbed Pikes Peak twice.

Two. Whole. Times.

That first trip is the one I really remember. Maybe I blocked out the second? That sounds about right.

The first climb was with our youth group, and we left early one morning at dawn. Since I was a high school graduate at the time and working for the youth pastor, Rick, as support staff, I went as a volunteer. I can’t remember how many of us went, but I know my 13yo brother, Patton, was there. We were both Pikes Peak virgins. At that point we’d been living in Colorado for just about a year and, after a handful of altitude-induced nosebleeds and some headaches, we had acclimated well to the climate. In fact, we loved it. Somewhere, tucked away in my closet, is a box or two I brought home after our mom died that contain what remains of our childhoods. In it there’s a picture Mom must have snapped of the two of us, sunburned and chapped dry, conked out on the couch together after we got home that evening.

We slept for 16 hours.

If you’ve never done it, the Pikes Peak trail to the peak is a 13.5-mile beast of a climb. Over the course of the 13.5 miles, you gain over 7400 feet in elevation. And in the first six miles you gain over 4000 of those feet. There are lots of tight switchbacks – so it’s not an easy section of the trail, but there’s also a lot of tree coverage in the lower elevation so the added physical drain that comes with sun exposure doesn’t happen until later. I honestly don’t remember struggling at all during that first section. We were told time and again by our youth pastor, Rick, to pack light and carry plenty of water, and back then Patton and I more or less did as we were told, so we were well-prepared and equipped. It also helped that at that time in my life I didn’t have a broken back and was quite fit.

Bless my 18yo heart. I wish I could go back now and tell young Kaysie just how well put together she was at the time. Physically, at least.

Around the 6.5-mile mark on the trail is Barr Camp. The average novice hiker is going to plan to stop here for lunch, and we were no exception. You have to carry in all your own food, and I remember being in great spirits at this point. We all enjoyed hanging out, eating lunch, getting hydrated, and making fun of whatever oddities we managed to find as people passed through.

After lunch, we grabbed our backpacks and continued the hike. Those first couple of miles after Barr Camp are deceiving. It’s the gentlest part of the hike, for sure, which I guess serves the hiker (and the hiker’s digestion system) well right after lunch. But it’s deceiving because you’re past the halfway point and feeling great, and the trail only serves to reinforce your sense that you’ve totally got this. Heck, I may have even told myself that this was easy.

I was wrong.

Once you hit mile three after Barr Camp it quickly becomes crystal clear that this is NOT easy. And there is still a very long way to go. The switchbacks kick in again, and the trees become more sparse the higher you go. At some point, as you approach the A-frame landmark, and the air becomes thinner, you stop joking around and having meaningful conversations with one another, and instead you focus on just breathing and putting one foot in front of the other.

At that point I remember being really glad I had listened to Rick and packed lightly.

That was also the point that one of the younger girls in our group began to whine and complain that her pack was too heavy. We ignored her for a while. But by the time we reached the “Three Miles to the Summit” sign, her whining became less of a whine and more of a complete shutdown. She kept stopping and sitting down – saying she couldn’t go on. But here’s the thing, you can’t stop at that point. And there’s no rescue. In fact, once you start the hike at the crack of dawn, your choices become two-fold – finishing the hike or going back down to the bottom. And at that point (just three miles from the summit), going back down would be harder and take longer than finishing those final three miles. We couldn’t let her stop. We pushed her. We kept pushing her. We took turns pushing her – one of us staying with her the whole time.

Finally, in an act of desperation, she threw down her pack and collapsed to the ground.

At this point, I was pissed. I was exhausted. I needed to expend 100% of my available energy (which wasn’t much) trying to get myself to the top and now here was this girl who was taking from the little I had available. In my frustration, I grabbed her pack, intending to shove it on her back myself… and suddenly realized the problem.

This kid was carrying everything she owned in that backpack. I couldn’t believe how heavy it was.

“What did you pack in here?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied through her sobs… “water, food, a change of clothes, extra shoes, make up, a brush, a mirror, a flashlight…” and on and on she went.

I may have spontaneously combusted in that moment.

Rick and I pulled away to debate over what we should do. I suggested we toss the pack on the side of the trail because she certainly wasn’t going anywhere with that pack on her back. But in the mountains the “Leave No Trace Behind” rule is sacrosanct. Leaving it behind wasn’t an option. And leaving her behind was also not an option (although that seemed like a solid choice to me). So instead, we agreed to take turns carrying her pack.

I’m pretty sure hiking those last three miles was the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done. And I’ve had four babies – three of them birthed naturally with no pain medications and extremely long labors. Okay, so maybe giving birth was harder, but there was the reward of an actual new human life at the end, so let’s say hiking those last three miles was the second hardest physical thing I’ve ever done.

For the remainder of the long and HARD hike, not only were we carrying her ridiculously heavy backpack as well as our own, we were literally pushing that kid up to the summit.

While she cried.

I had to dig down deep to find the strength to keep climbing, but I had to dig down even deeper to find enough Jesus in me to keep from strangling that girl. She was a heavyweight that we didn’t ask for and I can’t say that I carried her with a lot of grace that day. In fact, when we reached the top of Pikes Peak, while everyone was celebrating and clapping each other on the back, I struggled to join in. It took me some time to get over my frustration with that kid.

I also had to run to the bathroom and throw up, so there was that.

In general, I don’t carry things lightly.

I mean, I think I used to (except for heavy backpack girl).

Or maybe I was at one time less aware of the amount of weight I carried. Or maybe I once had the capacity to carry heavy things lightly, but don’t have as much capacity now.

It’s something I’d like to change, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to do so while still being honest about feeling weighed down.

That’s the tricky part – honesty and surrender all at the same time.

My mom managed it. There are literally hundreds and maybe even thousands of people who crossed paths with my mom, felt the warmth of her presence and the strength of her faith – never knowing that she was wife to an alcoholic/drug-addicted man who was sucking the very life from her veins while she worked herself to the bone to support him. And there were at least that many people who did know of the suffering she endured at the hands of my father and that knowing increased their felt sense of being strengthened by the seemingly unlimited well of faith within her.

Years later, when her body was riddled with cancer and she lay in the hospital, anyone who cared for her or came to visit her experienced the grace with which she suffered. She remained kind and loving and confident that Jesus was with her and would save her.

Spoiler alert: He didn’t.

But here’s the thing – in the wee hours of the nights I sat beside her hospital bed when she was sick; and in the 40 years of living with and supporting my father as we were manipulated and berated and abused by him; and in the last few days she was here on earth – suffering and resisting the morphine we offered her knowing it would ease her pain but also disconnect her from the people she loved…

She let me see the truth.

I saw the fear. I saw the hopelessness. I saw the doubt. I saw the desperation.

She carried a heavyweight.

There were even times when she was “heavy backpack girl” and I had to carry her pack for her while pushing her towards the summit. Actually, there were a lot of those times.

And, unlike with the kid on the mountain, I felt honored to be her person for so many years. She was the kind of person you wanted to be close to, the kind of person you wanted to be needed by, the kind of person who radiated light and joy despite her situation.

I didn’t realize until after she was gone that it’s hard to absorb someone’s light and joy when you’re exhausted from the work of helping them reach the summit.

Her joy didn’t become mine. She modeled it beautifully, but it wasn’t some inheritance I was entitled to.

And I didn’t realize until she was gone that she was a heavyweight. Not always. But sometimes.

I don’t mean to dishonor her with this confession. All of the wonderful things about her – and there were so, so many – are still true. And they did make my life better. But this is exactly my point. The things that are beautiful about us can coexist with the things that are really, really heavy and hard. Our culture doesn’t do a great job at this kind of cohabitation. The church certainly struggles with it. But not just the church. Everyone.

And the truth is that some people don’t carry heavyweights. (God bless those of you in this category, but you are not my people.) And some of those who do carry a heavyweight – maybe those who have wrestled it out, gone to therapy and done some inner work – have a better grasp on how to carry heavy things while maintaining an inner lightness while also being honest about how hard it actually is. (God bless those of you in this category. You are my heroes.) And maybe others of us who carry heavyweights are only able to do all those nice things after the heavyweight has been lifted. (God bless those of you in this category. Thanks for not leaving me here alone.)

And there’s the rub for me. My heavyweight isn’t going anywhere. It’s multi-faceted – chronic pain, grief and loss, chronic depression and anxiety, financial woes, physical limitations, complex family challenges – and reaching the summit feels impossible, at least in this lifetime. It’s hard to know that the climb – with its exhaustion, steep inclines, weather variations, and so many more hard things – won’t be done until I’m done with life on this earth.

But even though I don’t carry things lightly, I do keep climbing. I keep putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes ugly crying and often complaining, while Jesus offers to carry my overloaded backpack (and I struggle to give it to Him because for whatever reason I’ve packed all my precious things in there and don’t want to let them go) and even push me step after step towards the summit.

I’m grateful for His help, for His presence with me as I climb. And I wish it wasn’t so damn hard. And I’m exhausted. All of these are true.

Hopefully, one day, when I finally get to the peak of the mountain, He’ll celebrate freely with me despite what it cost Him to get me there.

And I’ll finally put that heavyweight down.

I don’t often choose a word or a phrase as my word or phrase for a new year.

It seems like an exercise in futility to try to harness a goal or an idea or a theme for a coming year full of unknowns. I guess 53 years of living on this planet of ours has made me hesitant – or cynical – or both. Honestly, sometimes I think I was born this way.

It feels safer to not hope.

I don’t really like this about myself. I don’t revel in it – or maybe I pretend to revel in it, but I do see the flaw – and I know my people see the flaw. #eyeroll

I see how it makes me not a lot of fun to be around at times. I shy away from goals, hopes and dreams, anticipation and even excitement…right up to the moment when I can be certain of whatever the thing is and confident that it all will go according to plan.

I know it’s problematic. Thank God I have a good therapist. She earns every penny I pay her.

But the truth is, I’m not sure this part of me can change this side of heaven.

So I’m trying something.

I chose a phrase for the year 2023 that both fits within my somewhat complicated paradigm and nudges me in the direction of hope.

Be here now.

I think there’s potential in the present moment. In fact, I’m starting to believe that each present moment holds more hope and fulfillment than any planning and goal-setting and anticipation for something in the future can ever give me.

I’ve been practicing this for a while now, so I have a bit of solid data to back up this theory. Plus, loads of research by people way smarter than me seems to point to something healthy about choosing to live in the here and now, even though it goes against the grain of our way of living here in the modern western world.

The here and now is where we are in the best position to do the thing we are meant to be doing. The here and now is full of opportunities for joy and contentment and connection.

The here and now is where my people are, so it’s for sure where I want to be. It’s where my grandbabies come running through my front door and into my arms for a SheShe Day. It’s where my 13yo stretches out his arms for a hug as I walk through the living room where he is playing his video game. It’s where one of my kiddos or a friend or a mama in the midst of great challenges with her children reach out for connection, encouragement and advice. It’s where my children (ages 25, 23, 22 and 13) still gather around and on our bed in the evening when they’re all home to just BE with me.

It’s where my husband faithfully and tirelessly leans in and draws me in to connection.

And it’s where Jesus does exactly the same thing.

The here and now is also where pain finds its way to my awareness. I don’t like this part of it. But the truth is, the pain is there whether or not I am aware of it. And choosing to acknowledge it, embrace it and FEEL it is the kind of presence that allows me to heal from it. And I don’t mean heal from it as in it goes away and doesn’t impact me any longer. That’s not actually the way it works. I mean heal from it as in making peace with its presence in my life.

Growing up, curse words were strictly forbidden. And rude gestures.

STRICTLY.

To be honest, they were so taboo that I didn’t even clearly know what they all were until I was well into adulthood.

At the age of five, I found myself embroiled in one of my first knockdown, drag-out girl fights. I have no recollection of the origins of this particular battle. I do remember the other girl was a bit too prim and proper for my liking… until she wasn’t. We yelled. We pulled on hair and clothes. We threw rocks at each other. It wasn’t pretty, but it sure was fun.

The fight culminated in a face-off in the middle of the apartment complex where we both lived. She was running away and I was screaming something about her chicken-livered heart, when she turned around and gave me the finger.

THAT finger.

Now, I had no idea of the meaning of this gesture. I didn’t need to in order to feel the power of it. I felt it BIG. And in response I whipped out my own tiny middle finger and raised it on behalf of all the scrappy girls trying to survive in the world.

It felt amazing. Glorious even.

Until I heard someone scream my name from the sliding back door of my apartment, “Kaysie Deanna DODDDDDDDD!!!! Come inside right NOW!”

Oh, crap.

Only I didn’t know the word “crap” either, so I couldn’t even say that.

Fast forward thirty-ish years and I found myself raising my own little ones and holding them to similar standards. I did my job well. Naïveté thrived in our home. Once while driving past a billboard advertising a rated-R movie, our then eight-year old daughter, Morgan, asked us what that rating actually meant. We explained that those movies were full of inappropriate content like swear words and violence. Morgan then leaned over to her little brothers and whispered, “Ohhhhhh… I’ll bet they say ‘stupid.'”

Bless her sweet little innocent heart.

Not that all of our kiddos toed the line this sweetly.

Charlie came home from his first week of first grade and announced to me that he had “learned all the swears.”

“Really, Charlie? All the swears? Do you even know what those are?”

“Yep. I learned them all today. Here, I’ll show you.”

And he proceeded to methodically spell EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Well, until I stopped him as he began to spell one that started with the letter “f.”

A few years ago, in the midst of great loss, heartache and stress, I suddenly found that all of these words that had been forbidden to me were popping into my head and coming out of my mouth with greater and greater frequency. Now, let me be quick to say that I didn’t (and don’t) have a problem with this. I think an appropriately-placed swear word here and there allows me a necessary outlet for the expression of another f-word I was taught was undesirable by God and others.

This f-word is actually harder for me to say than the one considered by most to be totally off-limits.

Feelings.

Ugh. Amirite?

The unacceptability and unreliability of feelings was not only a not-so-subtle message in my childhood home, it was the main teaching point of many a sermon taught from the pulpit of the various evangelical churches I grew up attending. In fact, if you do a Google search for “fact faith feelings train” you’ll find no shortage of clip art and faith-based teachings to support this idea.

Like this one…

I mean, it sounds right, doesn’t it?

Except that this isn’t actually what scripture says. 2 Corinthians 5:7 is the oft-quoted text used to back up the claim that feelings should take a back seat to the human experience if the human wants to follow Christ. Instead, this scripture tells us that we “live by faith not by what we see with our eyes.” (TPT) And by the way, don’t we as humans typically believe that facts are formed by what we see with our eyes? Hmmm… I actually think Paul would say his faith was informed by his encounters with God and his life experiences. And wouldn’t his feelings about those encounters and experiences be crucial? Remember, he didn’t have the New Testament giving him the facts. He was writing the New Testament.

All that to say, I received a very clear message as a child – feelings are not okay, not safe and not reliable.

And tbh, that set well with my temperament too. I liked feeling invulnerable. I liked feeling like I had everything under control.

Except that it just wasn’t true.

Our bodies don’t actually work this way. In fact, when we receive information in any form, the first thing our brains are designed to do in response is to feel. It’s a safety measure given to us by God within the very design of our bodies and brains. Our feelings are meant to inform the way we take in information, the way we relate to one another, the way we survive in this crazy hard world we live in.

Yes, facts are important. Yes, faith is elemental. But as my therapist likes to say, it’s a “both/and,” not an “either/or” situation.

Facts, faith and feelings are all meant to work together within and around us as we grow and develop.

For my part, I wasn’t (and I’m not) invulnerable. I didn’t (and I don’t) have everything under control. And the more I let myself feel my feelings, the more I learn to trust that they have some really good things to tell me.

The other day I watched My Girl on Netflix.

On purpose. #gluttonforpunishment

I’d been eyeing it for a while.

It kept popping up when I scrolled through my Netflix options – taunting me.

I’ve seen it before.

My brother and I saw it when it was first released in theaters. I believe it was a Thanksgiving weekend, and I was home with the family. We saw the trailer, thought we had chosen a comedy starring Macaulay Culkin (a trailer used to hold the plot of the film secret), and were excited to see something funny together.

Boy, were we wrong.

This is a story about an eleven-year old girl named Vada who lives with her father and grandmother in their home that also serves as a funeral parlor AND an embalming center (pretty much exactly like my own Mississippi family’s business.) Vada’s mother died just two days after she was born, leaving her devastated father to raise the baby alone.

He did the best he could, I think, but certainly little Vada grew up feeling the loss of her mother… and blamed herself for that loss.

Vada had one friend – a little boy named Thomas J. They did pretty much everything together and told each other all the intimate details of their inner lives – as much as any eleven-year old girl and eight-year old boy can do.

Tragically, and completely out of nowhere for the viewer, Thomas J is killed by an allergic reaction to the dozens of bee stings he receives after messing around with a hive.

By the time all the adults have gathered for Thomas J’s funeral and Vada, completely devastated, disrupts the ceremony with a brutal breakdown over the loss, my brother and I were completely undone. Like, moaning with sobs kind of undone.

So undone that I had to pull my car over to the side of the road as we were driving home. It’s not super safe to drive when you can’t see through your tears.

I’m sorry if I’m spoiling the movie for you, but this has been out since 1991, so I’m not that sorry.

Of course My Girl opened the floodgates of my usually locked-up-tight emotions. I knew it would. In fact, I watched it for that very reason. I needed the release I knew it would bring.

Every once in a while I’ll do the same thing with Steel Magnolias. Or Fried Green Tomatoes. Or E.T.

Dear God…E.T. When Elliot is ripping off his heart monitor and blood pressure cuff while screaming, “He came to ME! He came to ME!” I just can’t.

There’s something about familiar pain. Especially when it belongs to someone else.

I struggle to access my own emotions. Well, that’s not entirely true. Anger is always within reach. I can grab hold of that one with alarming ease. But other emotions – particularly the emotions that spring from sadness – feel inaccessible most of the time. I have a tendency to lock that part of myself up and forget where I hid the key. #sorrynotsorry

Not that I don’t sometimes cry. I do.

But not often for myself.

Sometimes, though, I can use the familiar heartache I feel for Vada as she tries to wrap her 11-year old self around the loss of her best friend, Thomas J, as an access point to the repressed grief and anguish of my own heartaches and losses which for some reason don’t feel familiar to me at all.

It’s a decent work-around.

And maybe someday my own child self will feel familiar enough to me to allow me access to those emotions without the work-around.

A few years ago, as we found ourselves watching our oldest three children prepare to leave the nest for college, marriage and whatever else lay down the road for them, we decided it would be a good idea to find an emotional support/therapy dog for our youngest who is on the autism spectrum.

Guess how much therapy dogs cost?

#allthemoney

So I turned to adoption and found our Daisy Mae via a local foster organization. And if you’re wondering whether or not that was a good decision, I give you the following photographs as evidence that it was:

This dog. She calms our boy. She calms all of us. She wasn’t trained to do this. We couldn’t afford to train her to do this. Her ability to calm is just a part of her nature. And what’s funny is that as much as she is a calming presence for us, she actually isn’t all that calm. She growls threateningly when a car door slams in front of the house six doors down. She freaks out when someone knocks on the door. She loses her mind when encountering men (young or old) wearing ball caps…especially if they’re also bearded. She doesn’t do well with other dogs. And the vacuum cleaner is tortuous every. single. time.

She loves car rides. LOVES. But she can tell when I’ve tricked her when I turn into the drive to visit our lovely vet and by the time I’ve parked the car, she has huddled as close to the opposite door as possible – shaking and whimpering and giving me her classic Olivia Rodrigo “you’ve betrayed me” eyes. The girl is a bit on the hefty side (no judgement here, Daisy Mae – I get you) and STRONG. It takes all of my strength to pull her out of the van for those visits, and we both end up traumatized by the time we get home.

Bless.

Despite the mildish irritation that accompanies these little quirks of hers, we have come to the conclusion that the secret to a good emotional support animal is to get a dog that has her own set of neuroses. Not only is she keenly aware of how to navigate the emotional minefield often present with our son’s autism, she also makes us feel safe. There is zero doubt in our minds that an unwanted intruder in our home would find himself (or herself – women can be criminals, too, ya’ll) at great risk of losing life or limb.

She sure is scary when she gets scared.

Same, Daisy Mae.

I can be scary. I’m an eight on the Enneagram, so anger is always hovering just below the surface. It’s my most dominant emotion and usually my first reaction to danger, to sadness, to frustration, and to pain – to name a few. I am innately designed to challenge others – their actions and ideas. Life experiences have enhanced this tendency exponentially. I’m not dissing myself. I like my eight-ness. I think good ideas are good because they hold up to challenge. I also think the safest people for me are those who are okay with my push back – or at least those who are willing to tolerate it. Within reason, of course…and my safe peeps are also really comfortable with telling me when I’m being unreasonable. Yes, that happens sometimes. A lot of times, actually. And yes, it makes me angry. They’re cool with that, too. #eyerollsfordays The truth is, the rest of the people eventually fall away anyway. I’m good with that, too.

The wisdom of the Enneagram (plus…#allthetherapy) has taught me a great deal about the angry energy that often spills out of me. The most disorienting discovery was that my angry stance is rooted in fear. When I first heard this from my therapist, I’m positive I gave her the look. You know the look. Well, if you know me then you know the look. I hear it’s scary. I hope it’s scary. Actually though, the moment I realized my therapist wasn’t scared by the look was also the moment I knew in my gut that she was the right therapist for me. It’s probably important to acknowledge that this was also the moment I wanted to run like hell out of her office.

I don’t think my anger looks like fear to others. At least, I like to believe it doesn’t. I want to feel big and strong in my angry stance. I want others to feel like I’m big and strong. I like what I’m able to accomplish from my angry stance. And I’m pretty sure I wield it well on behalf of others most of the time. I try to, anyway. And Daisy does, too. She never had puppies of her own, but she loves my people like they belong to her. She’s marked them as “in” which means she will protect and defend them at all costs. This is all well and good – pretty wonderful, actually – except for the times she moves into protect and defend mode when there’s nothing to protect and defend us from. Like when I’m sitting at my computer writing while she lays nearby and suddenly, out of nowhere, she leaps up and explodes with ear-splitting, ferocious barking that causes me to jump out of my skin. Or worse, when she’s sitting with our rarely calm and peaceful youngest child – helping to create a space of calm and peace for him – and then suddenly flips her lid because an Amazon package has been placed on our doorstep. For. The. Love.

Bless her hypervigilant little heart. Although there’s a certain level of hypervigilance innate to all dogs, it sometimes feels like hypervigilance is her resting state. I’m guessing that something happened to her when she was little that hardwired her nervous system to respond quickly to threats.

Same, Daisy Mae.

Anger is my way of shoring up defenses against the threats I sense around me because it’s WAY more palatable to me than fear, and it has served me well over the years. It has given me a sense of empowerment that I have needed time and time again.

The thing is, though, I don’t want to be an angry person.

And I really don’t want to be a fearful person.

My therapist has this maddening habit of using a white board during our sessions when it’s clear I’m struggling to feel anything but anger and overwhelm in response to whatever challenging situation I’m facing. As much as I hate to admit it, these little charting exercises of hers help me get to whatever is at the bottom of all the big feelings and bodily sensations that swell up inside me when something in my present touches on something in my past. I wish I could be more subtle with my irritation when she does this, but unfortunately, I’m kind of a pain in the ass. The best I can do in those moments is to limit my angst to eye-rolling, big sighs, and shifting uncomfortably on the floor. It’s embarrassing, but she usually decides to ignore it and keep going.

Also, yes. We sit on the floor. That’s a story for another post.

Inevitably, every time we do this white board exercise I end up realizing that the core belief underneath whatever it is I’ve said I’m feeling – be it frustration, anger, overwhelm, sadness, disappointment, and so on – is the one I least want to acknowledge.

I am not safe.

And guess what emotion is associated with this core belief?

Blarg.

Fear.

This is a brutal realization every. single. time.

Which of course makes me mad.

I am so predictable. #insertmoreeyerollinghere

But despite the great discomfort over the revelation, I have to admit that learning that the rage often swirling around within me is fueled by terror has begun to bring me to my knees before the only One who can really calm and soothe my terrified little self.

And it’s not Daisy Mae.

Jesus sits with me. He hears me out. He helps to still my soul – slowing down my racing heart, guiding me through deep, cleansing breaths, and calming my stressed and shaking body. Sometimes He does this through my therapist because I’m too human and need another human guiding me through it. Regardless of how it happens though, slowly, but surely, my whole self responds to His presence with me. And the anger and the fear both fade. They don’t fade away. But they most certainly do fade.

They say boredom is good for children – that it inspires creativity and individuality. I’m not sure that was true for me. My experience tells me that unsupervised boredom (NOT unsupervised activity – there’s a difference) in the hands of children leads to ER visits, soul wounds inflicted by neighborhood bullies, or at the very least, ill-conceived schemes where someone (not me) runs crying home to mom.

In the summer of 1979, in the midst of true boredom, my friend and I set a goal for ourselves. We decided to jump off the roof of every house in our neighborhood. We were ten years old, but we were undeterred by our age or our size. We believed in ourselves. And by the end of August, sure enough, we had done what we set out to do.

One by one Dena and I scaled the side of every house on Archwood Street. We sat on the shiny black shingles of each roof in the sweltering summer heat while we worked up the nerve to jump off the house and…about three hours later we jumped to the ground below. Hey, it’s harder than you think.

Sometimes we had friends cheering us on at the bottom. Sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes the houses were simple one-story structures requiring very little chutzpah. Occasionally, we faced a real challenge with the steep, slanted roof of a two-story house.

But we did it. We successfully jumped off the roof of every house on our street.

I know. Crazy. It’s a fun little anecdote to tell at parties, but you can be sure I kept this little ditty about my childhood from my own children until they were old enough to know better than to do anything like it. Although, funny enough, even with my safety hypervigilance, my kids didn’t make it through childhood without a few broken bones of their own. I guess kids will be kids.

It’s pretty clear the 1979 Summer of House Jumping, combined with some other dumb, boredom-induced, thrill-seeking stunts done in the first 25 years or so of my life… as well as a couple of other events and conditions mostly outside of my control – eventually gave me a back that all the kings horses and all the kings men tried their best to put together again. I feel ya, HD.

My back now looks like this:

And my neck looks like this:

Lucky you – I don’t have pics of the spinal cord stimulator in my left hip, but it’s there – connected to wires threaded into my spine and humming along 24/7, doing its darnedest to block the pain signals running from my low back, through my right leg and down to the bottom of my right foot all of the freaking time.

I’m basically a living, breathing bunch of screws and electronic devices. My kids call me Cyborg Mom.

Turns out the surgery that fixed the broken bones and instability in my back also triggered a rare disease called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). This condition is perfectly named. It’s complex because it’s rooted in the neurological system and because it presents with a host of symptoms not commonly connected. I’m talking poor circulation, poor temperature control, swelling, spontaneous hair or nail growth (I know… blech), discoloration of the skin, and pain, pain, and more pain. It’s regional because it’s usually isolated to a particular part of the body. And it’s a pain syndrome because the pain signals are stuck in a loop. They never stop.

And since it’s neurological, and our nerves are necessary for function, CRPS often leads to permanent disability.

Permanent is a tricky word. People don’t like it very much… unless of course it’s attached to something wonderful.

Permanently rich – yes, please

Permanently healed – hallelujah, yes and amen

Permanently abundant in coffee and chocolate – I mean, of course

We like things permanently fixed, permanently settled, permanently resolved. But when the permanent is attached to an unpleasant and debilitating experience, it’s understandable that we are willing to try just about anything to change it for the better… permanently. I have spent much of the last 20 years doing just that as I’ve battled first with the busted back and then CRPS.

Chiropractic care. Physical Therapy. Massage. Essential oils. Supplements. Every form of exercise (EVERY. ONE.). Diet. Prayer.

So. Much. Prayer. All in a forceful, determined effort to permanently fix what was wrong with my body. And I believed for a very long time that permanently fixed was an option. The goal. The end point. Maybe even the fulfillment of a promise without which I was less than – not whole. And I for sure believed that giving up on this made me a quitter.

When the reality was and is that some things in this world are permanently broken. And sometimes surrender to the broken places is the ultimate goal – the end point.

That’s hard to accept.

It’s hard to see acceptance of brokenness as anything but defeat, and it’s hard to reconcile a state of acceptance and surrender with the survival instinct to keep trying to make things better. And maybe acceptance and the determination to keep fighting for something better are two sides of the same coin. Maybe that’s where hope lives. Somewhere between acceptance of the broken and painful places and an innate compulsion to keep trying to make things better. Maybe that’s where we live our best lives, too.

It seems to me that this is how the Apostle Paul lived his life.

Somewhere between the harsh realities of Romans 7…

I know that nothing good lives in me.

Who will rescue me from this body of death?

And the hope and courage of Romans 8…

We know that all things work together for good...

In all these things we are more than conquerors…

Paul was way more enthusiastic about it than I am, though. Of course, I’m guessing he’d done a lot of work to get to that place. But I’m guessing he’d also accepted that successful living in this in-between place was a lifelong work in progress.

For years now my long-suffering therapist has been trying to help me live in this space.

It’s super fun.

I hate it.

But I’m beginning to understand that good therapists (or pastors, or mentors, or friends) help us live more wholly as we journey.

It’s a subtle shift in thinking.

But it’s a gigantic shift in how we experience our often painful realities.

It allows us to mark and honor the myriad of little – but excruciatingly difficult – decisions and choices made throughout our journeys. Choices that propel us forward while at the same time acknowledging the parts that are most likely permanently fixed in a state of brokenness until the day – the end point – when all things work together for good as we are transformed into the image of Christ – the promise of heaven.

We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

It’s been a while, I know.

In September, I had rotator cuff surgery as well as some other painful, but necessary cleanup in my right shoulder joint.

It’s hard to write when your dominant arm is confined to a sling for six weeks.

And unfortunately, getting out of the sling only marked the end of Phase One of this journey.

So now I’m in Phase Two of a three or four phase journey.

I’ve been here for weeks.

And the length of Phase Two seems to be unknown to all.

Phase Two is hard.

It’s that in-between space that holds everything that’s in process. Nothing is done. In fact, we don’t really have a sense of how it’s all going to work out. We have to do #allthethings and feel #allthethings and be #allthethings without any sort of guarantee that #allthethings are going to be alright.

Actually, it’s the space that often redefines what it means to be “alright.” Because often, when the journey is complex and full of undesirable events and experiences, the end result isn’t actually where you had intended to land. Part of the end (Phase Three?), then, involves some sort of acceptance of the new normal.

I’ve sometimes heard this referred to as liminal space – the space between what was and what will be. Often it’s used to describe a place of expectancy and is compared to the process of conceiving a child, carrying the child through its development in the womb, and then delivering the child into the world. It’s an appropriate comparison, I think. The problem with the use of this metaphor for me, though, is its emphasis on the end result, and its tendency to forget what those nine months of pregnancy are like for most women. In my case, at least, those nine months were quite miserable.

Just a few weeks into my pregnancy with our first child, I was given a book called Supernatural Childbirth. The book is a testimony to how faith in God’s love for us and and in His power to heal us can make pregnancy a blissful experience – with no morning sickness, no pain as your body adjusts to the growing little one inside you, and little to no pain during childbirth. For the author of this book, this had been her experience, and I think she genuinely wanted every other woman to have a similar one.

I devoured that book.

I embraced the ideals she put forth as if they were promises given to me by God.

I really expected to have a pain free pregnancy and delivery.

I didn’t, though.

Instead, I ended up on bed rest at 16 weeks because I couldn’t stop vomiting and was at risk of being hospitalized. Once I got the vomiting under control – meaning I threw up once or twice a day instead of all freaking day long – I continued to fight overwhelming fatigue throughout the pregnancy, along with the typical aches and pains most everyone experiences as a HUMAN BEING grows within your body and forces it to make more and more space for it and less and less space for your internal organs. Still, I hung on to the hope that my delivery would be a breeze. I believed this was something God wanted for me. Truthfully, I embraced the idea that, as a Christian who was following Jesus, I should have access to rescue from pain and suffering in my life.

In retrospect, I’m surprised I felt this way. My life had been full of a sizeable share of suffering and disappointment – even as I tried to live as I had been taught by the church and even as I loved Jesus from an early age. I didn’t actually have any experiences that justified this expectation I had.

I think I just wanted it, so I believed I should have it.

I didn’t get it, though.

And I’m SO grateful to the labor and delivery coach who, while embracing the teachings of Jesus and intertwining Christian values in her coaching, made it clear to those of us in her class that it didn’t make sense to her to believe that the resurrection of Christ eradicated the consequence of pain in childbirth placed upon women when Eve sinned against God in the garden, when it was clear that it hadn’t eradicated the hardships that were promised to man. So when I asked her about the pain-free experience of the author Supernatural Childbirth, my coach replied with, “Kaysie, 10% of all women have pain-free or very low-pain childbirths. It’s NOT a guarantee. It’s a statistic.”

At hour 24 of a 27 hour labor, my labor coach’s teaching on this matter was very comforting to me and helped me lean in to Jesus instead of causing me to feel abandoned by Him when the waves of pain engulfed me before our beautiful baby girl was born.

And it helped me when pregnant with my other three babies, dealing with the same or worse along the way. I mean, I carried the last (and very much a surprise) baby as an almost 40-year old WITH A BROKEN BACK. That did not feel good.

I guess I say all this to say I have rarely been rescued from the pain and suffering of life in my world.

I have. But not often. And with little-to-no rhyme or reason as to why God steps in to rescue me or He doesn’t.

But of course it’s one thing to struggle and suffer while waiting in anticipation of something you’re pretty sure will be wonderful (i.e. a beautiful baby girl). It’s an entirely different other thing to wait in that same kind of space when it’s also full of uncertainty about what will come in the end.

We struggle with this, don’t we?

In a culture accustomed to solving problems quickly, satisfying needs the moment they come up, and soothing whatever lack we are experiencing by filling the void with something else we deem equally satisfactory, we are uncomfortable with holding patterns of pain and suffering.

At least I am.

The last eight to nine months have felt like liminal space to me. As a culture, Covid-19 seems to be effectively smashing our ideas around what we are entitled to, frustrating our expectations of how long something hard should last, and stretching thin our tolerance for a lack of whatever makes us comfortable.

It’s destabilizing.

Especially when our line of sight doesn’t extend past the end of our noses. And, let’s be honest, we all struggle to see further than that.

The season of Advent begins today. For followers of Christ, this is a time when the church collectively begins to prepare for the arrival of the Messiah. It’s a season of expectation. We spend time reflecting on the promises of God laid out during the thousands upon thousands of years that His people had to wait – in the midst of great suffering – for His rescue. Advent helps us to sit in and pay attention to the experiences we have that often mimic the pain seen over and over again throughout the history of man. And it helps us remember that rescue is coming…Jesus.

But rescue doesn’t look like we expect it to.

I can’t imagine that it looked like Mary expected it to either. Or like the disciples expected it to when they chose to follow Jesus during His ministry years.

So why does it surprise us when rescue doesn’t look the way we thought it would…or should?

It seems to me that living in liminal space – waiting in the tension between what was and what will be – is more similar to the experiences of those early followers of Jesus we so often say we want to emulate.

And it seems to me we are living in this kind of space now.

As we move into the Christmas season, I hope we can settle into the interminable Phase Two of the pandemic – not knowing how long it will last, who is going to get sick, who will experience it like a bad cold and who will lose his life from it, whether or not the things we are asked to do for the sake of our communities will work, and how much all of this will cost us in the end – with grace for one another and with a sense of hope and faith in the One who actually did come to rescue us.

In the One who knows that the rescue we really need is the rescue of His presence.

Emmanuel, God with us.

My mom often told me the story of when I was about 15 months old and had to be rescued by firemen.

It seems I had squeezed my toddler-sized head through the slats of my crib and no amount of pushing or pulling would release me from its grip.

I have zero memory of this event, but after so many retellings of the story, I find that I can imagine what it must have been like for baby me in those moments.

I can take an aerial view and see myself trapped in what was meant to be a place of rest. I can see me screaming and inconsolable while my mom did everything in her power to release me. I can see her crying and saying my name over and over and over again – “Kaysie! Kaysie! Oh, baby, hold on! I’m so sorry! I’m going to call for help!”

I can feel the fear explode in its intensity and take over my body.

And I can imagine terror really setting in as strange-looking men came in to rescue me.

The whole thing probably lasted about 30-45 minutes, but I’m sure to both my mom and to me it felt like an eternity had passed by the time the firemen cut me out of that crib.

With the crib now destroyed, I was moved to a big girl bed…which I’m guessing I was all for. I have always preferred wide open spaces, and regardless of its actual purpose, I can imagine that the crib made me feel confined rather than secure. The vastness of my new bed, while also rife with its own share of complications (Hello alligators living under big beds just waiting for your feet to hit the floor, so they can grab you and pull you under…amirite?), made me feel one step closer to being all grownup and FREE.

I was pretty confident that adulthood came at the age of 18 (🙄); that it would provide me with all the freedom I craved; and that it would allow me to escape from the responsibilities and burdens of being my parents’ daughter. In fact, I so looked forward to this time that I announced my departure plans to my parents at the age of five. I thought it was a pretty solid plan.

I’m going to move at least 750 miles away from my family – probably to Liberty University so I can sing with the traveling ensemble there.

You guys, I was a baby. A teeny, tiny indoctrinated Southern Baptist baby. Don’t judge.

I bet that was hard for my mom to hear. Hopefully, my charm and precocious nature made up for my lack of tact.

I’ve written a lot here and here and here about the kinds of childhood experiences that surely contributed to this longing to escape, but I can see now how I set myself up for great disappointment.

As an adult hanging on to childish notions about autonomy, it’s oppressive and isolating to experience limitations – to feel like my wings are clipped just as they’re about to spread wide open because my circumstances keep me trapped and unable to live my life freely.

I’ve had a lot of independence as a grown-up girl, but the vast majority of my experiences with freedom have come from internal states of heart and mind rather than from my circumstances. In fact, when I’m unable to access freedom despite my circumstances, I’m unable to experience freedom in any circumstance.

Unless I choose to define freedom in some other way.

In July of 2007, I found myself trapped in Houston.

A week had passed since the day Molly and I attempted to drive dad back to Tulsa following major surgery at MD Anderson…only to find ourselves right back there as dad was re-admitted for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) – a highly contagious staph infection resistant to many of the antibiotics used to treat infection.

My brother had flown in to join me, and we spent our first few days there walking the halls, visiting Dad in his isolation room, and asking #allthequestions of the doctors, but never getting any real answers. Finally, we decided it was time to take matters into our own hands. We both had families with young children at home, spouses shouldering it all on their own, and Patton needed to get back to work.

We couldn’t afford to be stuck in Houston indefinitely.

But discharge from the hospital was nowhere in sight.

And the staff of doctors treating my father couldn’t seem to get on the same page in order to make a united decision on when and how to release him.

I think everyone was tiptoeing around for fear of some sort of liability after the disastrous discharge we’d experienced before.

But we didn’t have time for that nonsense. We needed to go home.

Dad was better. I mean, he was better from MRSA. He was still a very sick person, but he was getting stronger. Patton and I felt pretty confident that he could withstand the drive back to Tulsa, and his doctors at home were ready to take over his care.

And still the staff at MD Anderson avoided a decision.

Plus, my dad was living his best life – waited on hand and foot by nursing staff, both of his children there, visiting him dutifully, and responsible for his care. He wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere.

It felt like I was destined to be trapped in my father’s brokenness for decades to come. I believed freedom lay in one of two outcomes – with my dad’s death or with my choice to cut him off completely.

My brother and I called for a meeting. We asked for the entire team to be present because from our perspective, the real problem was that there were so many various doctors caring for our father – oncology, pulmonology, cardiology, infectious disease, speech and physical therapy. It was a long list because pretty much every bodily system in my father was the squeaky wheel trying its best to get all the attention. We all gathered around a conference table in a painfully bright hospital room, and Patton and I insisted they work together to come up with a discharge plan or – if they felt dad needed to remain in the hospital – a transfer plan to a Tulsa hospital.

It must be hard to work in a cancer hospital, constantly confronting death with grit, hope and persistence in the face of formidable odds. It must be hard to accept defeat when the inevitable is upon you – upon the patient you’ve been trying to save. It must be hard to acknowledge when death is winning the fight.

I know it is.

I’m confident my father’s medical team was deeply committed to continue fighting for him to live and not die. It also makes sense that sometimes doctors feel trapped by the fight for life when death is actually the more humane choice. Oh, how we needed just one of them to tell us that we could shift out of fight mode and into release mode- to tell us we wouldn’t be trapped there forever.

As it was, dad’s medical team was convinced that they had saved him, and all he needed now was time to recover. They also had no idea that their belief that he would recover and continue to live was devastating to us. It didn’t instill hope. Only dread.

This promise of recovery bestowed upon us felt like a death sentence to me. I knew that whatever recovery he achieved would be fraught with pain and suffering – physically, yes, but the real pain lay in the sickness of his heart and mind.

And even though the little girl in me still hoped her dad could become whole and healthy here on earth, the grown-up me knew it was never going to happen.

God – ever the Gentleman – would never force Himself or His ways upon us, and my dad was not going to be the exception to this rule. Dad had been given more opportunities than most to turn his life around, and he just could not do it.

This was a devastating conclusion, especially in light of the medical team’s promise of more life for dad. More life for dad felt like it meant less life for me.

Friends, that is a horrible space to live in. I don’t recommend it.

I sat in that meeting with dad’s team of doctors and felt the familiar weight of unwanted responsibility wrap itself around me.

I felt trapped.

It took all of our powers of persuasion, but we were able to convince the medical team to allow us to take dad home to Tulsa. I was given a crash course on changing dressings and IV bags. The sweet nurse who taught me all the things deserves an extra set of jewels in her heavenly crown for putting up with the sudden onset of childish behaviors from Patton and me (mostly Patton, of course). We collapsed into hysterics as practiced the procedures for dad’s care on a medical dummy and were reminded of all the mischief we’d created with tongue depressors, ear and eye examination lights, and gauze and bandages when we played doctor within the various doctor offices we’d found ourselves stuck in through childhood and adolescence.

Or maybe she understood that it was better for us to laugh than to cry because once the tears started, we were afraid they would never stop.

Either way, I was grateful that she was cool with it. I felt more at home as a child in the situation than I did as my 38-year old self. My child self had lots of experience with those feelings of entrapment…and still believed they would go away at some point.

A couple of days later we drove dad home to Tulsa, and Patton flew back home to Colorado. Life became consumed with raising my three children and taking care of the ongoing needs of my dad…and I often found myself struggling against the chains of these responsibilities.

Thankfully, I had people in my life who reminded that freedom was possible even in the midst of great burdens. Even with a life filled with constricting circumstances.

I can experience rest in whatever place I find myself by leaning into the One who is my refuge and my strength.

It wasn’t nearly as pretty as that last sentence makes it sound. It was a season filled with heartache, disappointment, exhaustion, anger, frustration and enormous stress.

Honestly, much of life feels designed to keep us constrained. It feels like the slats of your crib are only there to keep you in your place, and you forget that you are standing on an actual bed complete with mattress, sheets, cozy blankets and maybe a stuffed tiger or a Pooh bear.

Freedom comes when we shift our perspective and remember that even when we are trapped behind the bars of our circumstances, God’s design includes a place of refuge in Him where we can lay down and rest.