Amy Julia Becker's Blog, page 41

Small Talk Is Available as an Audiobook

Are messy diapers, loads of laundry, and sleep deprivation part of your life right now? Nine years ago, Small Talk was published, and I just got to record it as an audiobook.

Small Talk: Learning From My Children About What Matters Most is a book about parenting.

It’s a book about faith.

It’s a book about being a parent of a child with a disability.

It’s about finding out that God is present in the midst of a lot of messy diapers and dishes and messy thoughts and prayers that don’t even get spoken because you’re too tired.

I would love for you—especially if you’re a parent of young children or a parent of a child with a disability—to check out Small Talk. It was just released on Audible this week.

To celebrate, I’m giving away an audiobook. To enter to win, just comment with an emoji that describes your parenting years or tell me why you want to win the book!

This giveaway ends on Monday, June 5, 2023, at 11:59 pm ET.

More with Amy Julia:

A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny What Would You Say to Your Teenage Self?I Want Our Kids to Accomplish Things, Not Achieve Them

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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What Does It Mean to Say “Life Is a Gift”?

When I was lying in the hospital bed a few hours after Penny was born and diagnosed with Down syndrome, a nurse told me, “I had a special child too.”

I locked eyes with her and said, “How old is your child now?”

I expected to hear something lovely but not necessarily comforting about her teenager. 

Instead, she said, “He died. A long time ago.” The words hit me like a bucket of ice water. I wondered why she had brought him up at all.

I winced and said, “Oh. I’m sorry.”

And she shook her head, as if I didn’t understand what she was trying to say. “He was a gift,” she said. I never saw her again. But I knew that I needed to understand what she meant with those four simple words.

David Brooks writes about the distinction between what he identifies as two different forms of liberalism, one based on the idea of the self as autonomous and the other as a gift in an essay for the Atlantic about Canada’s recent legislation related to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID).

Brooks explains the first perspective:

“I possess myself. I am a piece of property that I own… My life is a project that I am creating, and nobody else has the right to tell me how to build or dispose of my one and only life.”

And then he describes the second:

“I am a receiver of gifts. I am part of a long procession of humanity. I have received many gifts from those who came before me, including the gift of life itself.”

If there is anything I have learned over the past seventeen years, it is that all of life is a gift. And when I shift from seeing myself as autonomous, when I shift from operating in transactional terms of buying and selling, I begin to experience the fullness of true life. I begin to experience life in relational terms of giving and receiving where there is abundance and connection and obligation and suffering and great joy.

More with Amy Julia:

What Is a Disabled Life Worth?MAiD and Lives Worth LivingS6 E17 | Questions for a Life Worth Living with Matt Croasmun

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

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What Would You Say to Your Teenage Self?

People ask me all the time what I would say to my teenage self. I was a hyper-driven achiever with a severe eating disorder that resulted in multiple hospitalizations and years of illness. I resisted therapy. I felt so much tension in my shoulders that I asked for a prescription of muscle relaxers. And there are kids today who feel a lot like I felt then. 

So what would I say to myself? What should we say to the teenagers who feel despair and pressure to achieve and anxiety and hopelessness?

There is no simple statement that would have made things better for me. And there is no simple statement that will magically or miraculously or instantaneously help our kids right now. But there is still so much hope and so much we can do to bring healing.

As I look back on my life, the difference was a person who was willing to offer me faithful love. 

Years ago, only one person in my life was bold enough to tell me what I wasn’t willing to admit to myself. My then-boyfriend (now husband) was the unlikely truth-teller who confronted me and spoke the truth that I was sick, that I needed help, and that I was beloved. 

And then, he stuck around. He didn’t simply speak words of truth but he also walked with me through an arduous journey. 

Teens don’t need tough love. But they do need faithful love. They need to know the truth that anxiety and depression and self-harming behaviors are not good. They need to know the truth that they are utterly, abundantly, absolutely loved in the midst of those behaviors. And they need the ones who speak that truth to stay with them through the healing. 

More with Amy Julia:

I Want Our Kids to Accomplish Things, Not Achieve ThemThe Significance of Our Social WorldsAddressing our Mental Health Crisis

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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May Introductions

Hi! If you’re new around here, I’m Amy Julia (double name–I also go by AJ). This lovely little corner of the internet continues to grow, so I wanted to say hello and introduce myself. I’d love to hear from you as well! So here are 6 things to know about me:

I never wear hats. I know the photo here suggests that I’m lying, but actually this was a highly unusual scenario in which I was letting go of anxiety and embracing the moment of a Taylor Swift concert while also accepting Marilee’s hat as a way to protect myself from the rain. But it kind of makes me want to wear hats more often.Still on the Taylor Swift thing (read my post from last week to get that whole story): I loved every minute of that concert. I also started yawning around 9:15, two hours before the show was over, because that is indeed my typical bedtime, even on a Saturday night.All of this is to say, I have always acted older than my age. That’s probably why I loved turning 40, because it was a long time coming. I am now 46, and my doctor tells me I’m officially shrinking, but I would rather be 46 than any other age. I love books. Reading, writing, editing. Here are the ones in my queue right now: The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, Transcendent Kingdom, The Candy House, King: A Life, and The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. Per that last point, my interests include teenagers, wellness, justice, Christianity, and spiritual formation. I love introducing people to the way of grace and love embodied by Jesus. I am rarely at a loss for words. This is both a true statement about me and a reason for me to cut off this introduction and make space for you to say hello in the comments! Welcome. I’m so glad you are here.

More with Amy Julia:

AboutBooksSpeaking

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Faithfulness Is Love Over Time

Faithfulness is love over time.

Steady, loyal, consistent love.

Even when we don’t believe that love exists.Even when we reject that love.

Even when we don’t return that love.

God remains faithful to us by remaining constant in love.

And I guess what’s so powerful and amazing about it is that when love is constant, loyal, and steadfast over time, it changes us. Faithfulness transforms us. 

We begin to believe it might be true. We begin to wonder whether it might really be the only thing that lasts. And then we soften to it. Like rocks turned into sand, worn down over eons. Like clay that begins cold and hard and gradually warms and becomes pliable. We soften and receive the love that has always been waiting for us. 

The God who is love is the God who is faithful. To each of us and to all of us. 

More with Amy Julia Becker:

Why a Superbloom Is an Image of Hope for UsWhat Story Are You Telling Yourself?Awakened Attention and Achievement Attention

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Seats That Money Can’t Buy at the Taylor Swift Concert

We ended up in seats that money can’t buy at the Taylor Swift concert last Saturday night. 

It started in March when we received two tickets at reasonable prices through the Verified Fan lottery system. Peter and I then decided to rescind our Christmas gift to our kids and we bought three more tickets (at exorbitant prices) for the concert. The problem was, we bought tickets for Saturday night. We received tickets for Friday night. 

I spent four days emailing SeatGeek to try to rectify the situation. Finally, they gave us three new tickets on the floor of the stadium. In other words, we got a huge upgrade free of charge. Which was amazingly awesome. Except that, we now had three seats on the floor and two in the nosebleeds, and you aren’t allowed to move back and forth between the two. We didn’t know how we would handle it, and I became a nervous ball of anxiety berating myself for not having tickets altogether and just wishing there was some way to change the way this was all working out. 

On Saturday night, I found a security guard and explained that we wanted our three kids to take the seats on the floor. Peter and I would go up to the rafters. “But,” I said, “our seventeen-year-old daughter has Down syndrome. She’s very small, and I’m not sure she’ll be able to see anything from the floor.”

He said he would help us decide who wanted to sit in which place. Peter and Penny arrived. The guard who was helping escorted us to a platform at the back of the floor. We climbed a ramp and took the corner of a platform, next to a woman in a wheelchair and a few seats down from a small crowd of deaf women and men. 

We were together as a family on the platform reserved for people with disabilities for the entire show. We had some of the best seats in the house. 

We watched the sign language interpreters sign. We chatted with the woman using a wheelchair. We danced and sang and got absolutely drenched by torrents of rain. It was glorious. And beautiful. 

It was beautiful to be at this glitzy, over-the-top, entertainment-event-of-the-decade, gazillion-dollar production, alongside the other people with disabilities. Sitting amongst the people who are most likely to go unnoticed, to be overlooked. Sitting amongst our people. With exuberance. And gratitude. And wonder. In the best seats in the house.

And that’s the thing. We didn’t get the best seats in the house through manipulation. We didn’t get them through scheming. We didn’t get them through money. We got them because we expressed our need and we were shown kindness. We got them because the Americans with Disabilities Act provides for people with particular needs, like ours. And I do believe we got them because of grace, abundant love that flows down like rain when we are least anticipating it and not deserving it and unbelievably grateful to receive it. 

The next morning, we were gushing about the whole experience and I said something about having seats we couldn’t have paid for if we had tried. Penny smiled and said, deadpan, “You’re welcome.”

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More with Amy Julia:

I Want Our Kids to Accomplish Things, Not Achieve ThemWhen We Talk for 20 Minutes

Our Daughter Doesn’t “Just Happen” to Have Down Syndrome

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Why a Superbloom Is an Image of Hope for Us

I just learned the word superbloom. According to Dana Goodyear, writing for the New Yorker (in a GORGEOUS photo essay), a superbloom happens when there is so much rain that an unexpected and unusual abundance of flowers fills the landscape:

“The 2022-23 rains have reversed, temporarily, more than a decade of catastrophic drought. Some of the seeds that caused this bloom have lain dormant for years, waiting for conditions to improve. These flowers are like earthly versions of starlight: they are the past made visible. They are also a vision of the future, a prediction, a promise, of what will happen when it rains again, if we can wait.”

I told Peter about this and he said, “Well that’s a hundred sermon illustrations waiting to happen.”

And he’s right. So many of us labor and wait through years of drought. But what if the seeds of growth are there all along, waiting for the moment when the rain comes, and the ground becomes fertile with possibility? 

For twenty years those seeds lay in the dry ground. Hidden from view. Seemingly dead and barren. And if those seeds had tried to grow, they would have withered completely. 

Staying hidden in the ground was protection for those seeds until the right time. It’s an image of hope for our own lives. When we experience dry ground for longer than we thought was possible, there are still seeds of promise, waiting for rain. The rain will come again. And those dormant seeds will burst into glorious and abundant bloom.

More with Amy Julia:

What Story Are You Telling Yourself?Falling Off the May TreadmillAwakened Attention and Achievement Attention

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

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Thank You, Tim Keller, for Confounding Us All

I’m joining the ranks of countless others when I write a word of thanks for the life and ministry of Timothy Keller, who died on Friday. Tim Keller is probably most well-known for his many bestselling books, but I am most thankful for his gifts as a preacher. 

Towards the end of my years in college, someone passed me cassette tapes of his sermons on 1 Corinthians 13, and he gave me a whole new understanding of love. Then, as Peter and I prepared to get married, someone else passed along a set of his sermons on Ephesians 5. We gave copies of those sermons to everyone in our wedding party, and we listened to them multiple times over the years. They helped provide a foundation for marriage that holds us to this day. 

The funny thing is, I did and do disagree with Keller when it comes to the roles of men and women. He believed the Bible outlines distinct roles for men and women. I believe both men and women can lead within the church and the household. The reason he (and his wife, Kathy) were able to teach me so much even in an area where we fundamentally disagree is that there was a shared foundation—faith in the gospel of grace—beneath our distinct positions on gender roles within the church. 

Tim Keller blew through my own categories of liberal and conservative. He developed in me—and countless others—a concern for human flourishing that burst through my individualistic lens. He confounded conservatives with his approach to justice. He confounded liberals with his approach to gender and sex. He sought after Jesus, not after success or popularity or perfection. He gave me an expansive view of God as a source of greater love and grace than my mind or heart could ever imagine. 

I am so grateful for him. May he rest in peace.

More with Amy Julia:

AJB Recommends: The Best of What I Read, Watched, and Listened To on VacationFour Spiritual Practices That Help Social Justice Stay Grounded in LoveThe Quartet of the Vulnerable and Justice

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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I Want Our Kids to Accomplish Things, Not Achieve Them

I don’t want our kids to achieve much. I want them to accomplish a lot. At least, according to the way Adam Gopnik distinguishes accomplishment from achievement, this is what I want. 

Gopnik writes:

“Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.”

Our son William joined the track team this spring. None of us knew what to expect. He just went out there and ran as fast as he could and paid attention to what the coach told him. And he enjoyed it. “Running up hills is kind of fun,” he admitted one day. He liked the feeling of getting stronger and faster and of blocking out everything else to just move.

So then one of the older students was injured, and William was asked to run a race he had never run before, and to do so in a Varsity meet. Later he said it felt kind of crappy to be the slowest member of the relay team. But his coach commended him for getting out there. The next time someone was sick, William ran on Varsity again.

And then came the league championship. He was asked to run in another relay. It didn’t go perfectly. Their team didn’t win. In another race that day, he came in second to last. 

It was so great. 

William didn’t achieve something out there on that track. By Gopnik’s definition, he accomplished something. He ran hard and did his best because he enjoyed it and cared about his team. 

What made that accomplishment possible? Paying attention to joy, connecting with other people, and working towards a common goal and for a bigger purpose. 

I want to teach our kids (and myself) how to live a life of accomplishment and not achievement.

More with Amy Julia:

Meritocracy Is the Antithesis to Love | Plough EssayAwakened Attention and Achievement AttentionHow Can I Practice NOT Proving My Worth?

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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What Story Are You Telling Yourself?

What if there are two true stories about your life? And what if they contradict each other?

Recently, I’ve realized I can tell myself two different stories about me. 

One is the story of being overlooked and unappreciated. The story of being seen only as a wife and a mother. The story of not selling enough books or having enough speaking events or growing my platform quickly enough. It’s a true story. 

The other is the story of being beloved and flourishing. The story of loving my family well. The story of gratitude for the work I get to do. The story of looking ahead to an uncertain future and trusting that the God who has given me purpose and gifts in the past is the God who will continue to lead the way. This is also a true story. 

Which story will I tell myself? How will I narrate my life to myself and to others? Which story tells the deeper truth? 

The story I tell is likely to be the story I live out. I want to live the story that includes hardship and sacrifice and also connects me to love and purpose and joy. And so I need to stop narrating a story of scarcity and live into the story of abundance.

More with Amy Julia:

The Vulnerable Power of Ted LassoFalling Off the May TreadmillAwakened Attention and Achievement Attention

If you haven’t already, you can  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest ,  YouTube , and  Goodreads , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

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