Sara Hagerty's Blog, page 2

The surprising connection between failure and wonder

“So tell us about a time when you experienced failure and how you handled it.”

I was 21 and interviewing for my first job out of college. It was a multi-day interview, and this question came over lunch with two local ministry directors for whom I wanted to work.

Like those few memories that stay distilled in your mind forever — two dozen or so in a lifetime, maybe — I remember it like it was yesterday. I stared at my sandwich from Zazu’s (a lunch spot that would become my favorite in the years to come), combing through my memories, and coming up with …nothing.

Surely I’ve had a failure, but I couldn’t access it.

What I didn’t connect to then was that I’d spent the whole of my newly-young-adult life avoiding failure; of course, I couldn’t come up with something. I was young enough to have succeeded at that mission, but I remember a smug warmth that came over my face as I told them I couldn’t think of an instance of failure … until one of the men said to me, “Learning to deal with failure will be an important part of your life.”

I write this 24 years later and fresh from a recent season of failure—a big one. And I’ve had plenty of “failures” since that fateful lunch: my body “failed” to conceive a baby for twelve years, my marriage failed to thrive for the first seven … or ten, depending upon which of us you’re asking , I failed to love him well — to name some of the biggies. I’ve had enough failures between then and now that I’ve started becoming thoughtful about them.

That question and my long, prideful stare at the Zazu’s lunch plate were portentous.

So many of us wake up, only to fall asleep sixteen hours later, counting our steps but overlooking the countless energy we spend on not failing. We bring the meal to a sick friend (though we can barely get dinner on the table for our family). We call the hurting friend back for fear of losing the relationship (though at that moment, our heart needs mostly to rest). We sign up to lead the committee (after the same morning we had told our spouse, “I can’t do one more thing”). We bark at our kids to get out the door on time (after all, we wouldn’t want to feel the shame of being late).

Who of us doesn’t hate that feeling that comes when we disappoint a friend or a kid or a boss? When our work isn’t acknowledged because it’s sub-par? When we’re not mentioned as the superstar on the team? When our creative work gets no applause?

The rare few feel okay about a C-. An F feels like a forever tattoo.

(Now, I’m distinguishing between sin and “failure” here — because the times when you underperform at your job because of stress at home, forget your kid’s costume for the big play, and binge on sugar after midnight three days into the Whole30 aren’t sinful, but they mark us because of how we see ourselves at that moment. There are certainly times, however, when sin and failure overlap. I failed at loving Nate for many years— and some of that was selfish sinfulness. But nor do I want to split hairs and miss the point: we hate when we fail, no matter the source.)

24 years of failure since that ominous lunch, and a connection is happening in my mind after this most recent failing grade. Failure scoots us right up to the mirror, where we see how we are finite. We are finite both when we are raging successes, and when we fail.

Except in failure, we can more easily see it.

When I fail, I don’t just acknowledge my finitude — I can’t look away from it.

Failure corners me.

And it’s in that place of sitting in the dust of what I tried to make out of my life and just flat-out couldn’t, that I notice … I finally notice, in the way that noticing becomes more than seeing but smelling and tasting and even wearing … my Creator.

Several mornings ago, I woke up again to the reality of a failure that I just can’t shift. My prayers aren’t moving mountains. (I know some of you are there, hoping that somehow, some way, this situation you’re in — this thing you “just can’t keep up” — might get graded on a curve, and it won’t be the failure it could be.) And as I sat there, absorbing this long, drawn-out moment of blood rushing to my face, my mouth dry and my throat tight, realizing (again) this isn’t going to change … I’ve failed here, I read this:

“Great is our Lord, and abundant in power” (Psalm 147:5).

And instead of praying one more time for God to fix what seems to be forever broken, it dawned on me: He is abundant in power. He can change this in an instant.

But He hasn’t.

And then I wondered if it’s because of the electric charge that comes through a moment (or better yet, a season) of failure. My chemistry shifts when I’ve failed and accepted the failure. I’ve known this before — I’ve seen it before. Life gets small. I feel incapable and powerless, and stuck. And it’s here that I finally (finally) stand like a blazed-eyed five-year-old with her toes in the ocean, watching the tide roll in over them in wonder.

Yes, friends: wonder.

Failure reminds us that we are not as bright, capable, consequential, or remarkable as we may have thought. We couldn’t make it happen. But we have a Creator who is … and He wants to open the world to us.

What a juxtaposition: I lose what I thought I wanted … and I gain His whole world.

Sounds dreamy and poetic, but I’m standing here like that little girl on the ocean’s edge telling you with my hand cupped around my mouth, through a whisper, “it’s real. It’s really real. Every failure of yours is His for the reclaiming.”

And practically, this morning, it meant that I counted the butterflies on my morning walk like a six-year-old. I may not have succeeded at the one thing I thought would make my life matter and would make my life meaningful, but God loves me, the failure, and has a lot to show me in this newly-small space.

Might I suggest, if you’re absorbing a failure in your life or a loss of sorts that you’ve worked so hard to win, that this may be the summer to take off your shoes?

The connection between failure and wonder seems odd, but it’s real.

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:26)

You lost what you worked so hard not to lose, but here in front of you is a bush of blazing fire.

Will you let it do its work?

The post The surprising connection between failure and wonder appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

How to have a new beginning when something hard in your life isn’t ending

Nate says he fell in love with me the night he saw me ugly cry, in grief, over a young friend I’d mentored who had died tragically. The grief was of the stage in which it came like a summer storm, surprise-darkening my thinking that had just minutes before been clear.

I was too young to know how to grieve well when she died.

(Do we ever know how to grieve well?)

All I knew was to keep doing what I was doing the day before I got that harrowing 1AM call. So I did. The flurry of my life activity surely took the edge off the grief, but like running through an injury, I think it was years before I felt any real recovery.

So a simple-stupid movie that had nothing to do with grief brought on a rush of tears that I simply couldn’t stop. Nate just watched me, fumbling with what to do and yet so curious about this level of unfamiliar vulnerability from me. We were just friends then — well, apparently, until then.

That night hangs like a Christmas ornament in my memories — a tangible picture of paradox I hold in my palm about once a year. I was embarrassed by my mess, unacquainted with the very grief that flooded me. I was clearly less far along on my road to recovering from Renee’s death than I had thought.

And yet somehow, that lit a spark in Nate. It was an early indicator of what I’d name a decade and a half into marriage: he cherished the weaker side of me more than (or at least as much as) the competence and drive I brought into “us.”

And the paradox of it all was that this profound loss that wouldn’t go away in a week could somehow intersect with a rush of love that would change me forever.

But we struggle with this kind of paradox.

We struggle with the nuance of Scripture that says things about Jesus like “His name shall be called …Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6), while reading Jesus’ own words, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).

We often don’t have a place for paradox.

So the night that grief flooded my system and sent me off-line, in my head, overwhelmed with feelings that had welled inside of me but that I hadn’t named, was not the night I’d imagined I’d fall into a lifetime love. There is an order, and this was not that.

But as I scan my friends and family in different parts of the world, I see a commonality: many of us are in seasons we’re convinced must run their course before … well … before we fall in love.

Whether it be that we’re waking to the reality that grief or trial or suffering requires much more attention than what I gave it twenty years ago, after I experienced my first startling loss to death, or that our energy is so limited that the “hard” seems to leave no room for much else — I wonder if we’ve missed the invitation for … paradox. For mystery.

To put it another way: can we receive the fruit that He has for the next season while still grieving the last?

I don’t know, but I’m asking.

Because there are a few weighty, unfinished pieces in my life that the thirty-five-year-old version of me would be banging down the walls of heaven to shift that … as I pause and reflect … seem like necessary elements for me in the next.

Can both exist together: loss, pain … and profound fruit, and new life?

Maybe. My life is saying maybe. And I look at the Word and I can’t deny this:

“Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord;

I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

God, the Lord, is my strength;  he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places.” Habbakuk 3:17-19

Pause and re-read that.

The paradox of profound joy and “treading on high places” juxtaposed over a field with no food, flocks, or fruit — could this be your invitation? Might this be why you’re reading this today?

This is where I am — staring at a fallow field in my life, uncertain whether the blood and sweat prayers of my heart will fertilize what feels long-dead — and yet feeling intrigued and curious about this thought I can’t shake that love [His love] might find me here, again.

I’ve had a few times in my life like this, and, looking back, I can see that pain did its work — rather, God did His work through the pain. It opened long-sealed doors in the rooms of my house to air them out with the light of day, such that they might now be remodeled, renovated by … joy.

What a paradox — this 1 Peter 1:6-8 and James 1:2 reality: that joy and pain can exist beside one another. They are not mutually exclusive. And maybe the greater the pain, the greater my newly carved capacity for joy.

This past year was a doozy, and right when we were coming up for air, we had that “phone call” with more bad news … but the whisper from God (that I received deeply in my inner being) was: you’re going to touch a joy like you’ve never known this year.

Could it be?

I ask myself this as I scan the corridor of my life and I see instances where it was true … and as I study the Bible and see that this paradox was embodied in a God-Man who cried, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me” AND set the entire world free from the chains that had long bound it into forsakenness — all in the same weekend.

Based on my anecdotal sampling of the world around me — I’m not alone. Many of us are facing waves of loss. If this is you, go on a test run with me and ask Him: God, will You give me new beginnings with you as I grieve the old that I wish wouldn’t die?

I suspect this paradox is that for which we were made. It might even be that searching for this paradox in our days is part of how we will survive these trials.

The post How to have a new beginning when something hard in your life isn’t ending appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

Reading the Book Instead of Writing the Book

Mrs. Van Horn’s second-grade class was the right place to dream.

I felt safe in her classroom, even though Craig Assenmacher, who sat behind me, told me it looked like I had a bird’s nest on my head after I got a risky haircut. (I received a bob and discovered I was nothing but curls at my roots).

Mrs. VanHorn defended me, and she made room for me.

When it came time for our second-grade architecture project (can second graders do architecture? — Mrs. Van Horn thought so), I began to envision a city like no other. As was true for most of my life back then, I lived in my imagination, saving the wee last bit of time for implementation. But sadly, what I imagined in my mind became impossible to construct in real life. So impossible that even now, 38 years later, the memory of that feeling still feels like one of the clearest childhood memories I carry.

As I began to build my city, the buildings leaned and tipped — my foam board foundation held a tangled mess of a place to live. This was a day before it was due.

On the morning it was due, my dad helped me to carry my project into Mrs. Van Horn’s classroom — my head held low, but not low enough that I didn’t notice the masterpieces created by my classmates. Miniature towns that looked like a Department 56 Dickens’ Village. Crisp lawns and clean white architecture — cities that invited the wonder of seven and eight-year-olds, imagining themselves shrinking to the size of their pinky so they could live and govern in these wonderlands.

No one else held actual second-grade craftsmanship in their hands (at least not that I can remember).

Perhaps this story remains fixed in my mind because my dad also would come to remember it. He painfully watched me fumble through creating a wonderfully-unsound architectural village — one that made perfect sense in my mind but didn’t quite translate onto a foam board. But he chose to let me do it my way, without interference, and later told me that he whispered (only partly in jest) to Mrs. VanHorn — a longtime friend of his — something to the effect of: “she put her whole heart into this. You give her less than a B and I know where you live.”

This story used to speak to me of my girlish imagination, often unmoored to reality. But lately, it’s returned to me with the resonance of a different kind of arc.

Whether we’re seven or 37, or 57, we imagine how life should unfold. Yet, so many of us soon find ourselves like my second-grade self at 730AM in my uniform plaids and knee highs, showing up to Mrs. VanHorn’s class with a foam board containing something far from what we had pictured in our minds.

The architecture of our lives has proven to be unsound.

So … what then?

The image of what we thought “should have been” rarely disappears quietly. Just as I can still picture what I imagined my project to be (no exaggeration), I daydream about the life I think I should be living today. I angle my story, my days, toward that story — that picture — that image in my mind of where I think I should be in my motherhood, my marriage, my writing, and my friendships.

I don’t realize it … until I can’t get away from the dissatisfaction I feel over where my life actually is and how my days are lived. I’ve worked so hard to avoid anything like that walk of shame into Mrs. VanHorn’s class, anything that will compare my project — my story — with another’s.

So many of us are tired, not because our circumstances are exceptionally tiresome (though they might be), but because we’re still trying to live into what we imagined they should already be — in our minds. We are ignoring that gravity sometimes means that buildings topple; life doesn’t often turn out how we construct it in our still-youthful imagination.

The days I spend letting my unexamined mind survey my messy desk (wishing it were more organized), the complicated hearts of my kids (wishing they were more orderly), the bumpy relationships in my home and outside of my home (wishing they were simply more fun) — are my most tired days.

My tiredness reveals: I’m (still) trying to write the book of my life rather than read it.

Jesus told me and you:  “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-29)

As much as I expect the end to my tiredness to come from long days by the ocean or a trip to the mountains, God simply suggests I stop trying so hard to have my life look my way. The soul rest comes to the one who sets down their pen and stops trying to write the story … but instead envisions themselves as a reader.

There are things you are resisting, and I am resisting — spending so much energy fighting — but they are vital plot twists, and the light is dawning. We’re chasing dreams that may not be His dream for our lives. There are chapters we’re staying up late writing and waking early to compose that He doesn’t intend for the main plot.

“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat— for he grants sleep to those he loves.” (Psalm 127:1-2)

Perhaps we’re writing in vain when the invitation is glorious: sit by the ocean of your life … and read. Watch. Observe. Take note. And participate in what won’t tire you but will settle you.

I finished The Count of Monte Cristo this winter. 900+ pages of story that enfolded me and enraptured me … it quickened my heart and made me think and calmed my insides during a very un-restful season.

And I wondered as I closed the book: is my invitation to read what You’ve already written, God, and read what You’re real-time writing in my life … instead of working so hard to write my own?

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“You just don’t get it”

I let a friend down. Or, I should say: I let *another friend* down. I can tell she’s mad, not yet hurt. Just mad. I receive her frustration with me, and my mind instinctively flashes to that old friend of a phrase: you just don’t get it.

… I’m late. I ran a red light, and I’m still late. With the charcuterie board on my hip, I bump the car door shut and stumble across the street to the front porch, hiking my purse on my shoulder. Did I brush my teeth before I left? I imagine a few slightly judgmental faces inside, amid a sea of gracious friends, and I hear myself saying in my head to those judgmental looks: you just don’t get it.

… I return home from the grocery to discover I purchased steaks at $27.99 per pound — I had looked over my shoulder, only to look back and point to the wrong steak in the display case. And I forgot three critical ingredients for dinner. I tell the imagined world that is watching my every move: you just don’t get it.

“You just don’t get it” would be followed by: “my life, my everyday limitations, the ways I’m pressed that few understand, make things like letting people down, and showing up late and discombobulated, and not paying attention to details understandable.”

My story, my days, are different than yours, but I wonder if we share this in common: there are parts of our lives, tucked away and unique to us, that impact our waking and our sleeping and the hours in between … that only a few might understand. And, there are parts of our lives that we foist in front of others in hopes that they might see and receive and be gracious to our weaknesses in return — only to feel further misunderstood and alone.

So rather than keep trying, we bury the deep longing inside of us to be seen and celebrated for the beauty coming out of those parts, to be held and encouraged in the pain coming out of those parts. We shame ourselves and our desire to be seen … and we bring the charcuterie board to the party, order the steaks, forget our friend’s big day … and then we mutter “you just don’t get it” under our breath.

Then friendships get built on a craggy foundation. I’m telling myself I’m ok not being seen, but I still want you to see me, and I’m frustrated you don’t, but I’ve not identified my craving to be known and understood, so we can’t talk about this weirdness between us. Marriages work this way, too.

Until we name the craving deep inside to be seen, known, understood, and celebrated, we will walk into every relationship holding out an empty cup. Even the people — dare I say, especially the people — who serve and pour out the most carry the empty cup, if their desire is not named.

Years ago, I spoke to a group of women at a church in the northeast about this craving to be seen. A woman in her eighties approached me afterward. She had big round eyes that revealed a long corridor of stories behind them. “When I was a little girl, I loved to dance,” she said nervously, sharing with the caution that comes with vulnerability. “I wanted to be a dancer. My father was a very busy and hardened man, but I would twirl in the room and take circles in front of him, asking, ‘Daddy would you watch me dance.’ He never looked up. My dad never watched me dance.”

She had lived less than a decade of life when this happened. And yet seven decades later, she had revealed with tears in her eyes: we never get over being unseen. And especially by the ones God made to see us.

Most of us bury the desire and move on … not realizing that the power of this desire, unnamed and thwarted, can cause us to do all kinds of acrobatics to win friends that eventually exhaust us. This unnamed desire can define our personality — always the happy one, always the servant, always the friend who shows up at your door when you need them, always agreeable.

But are we that way — were we truly designed that way — or has our life become a response to a desire that we fear to name, but has great power over us?

God made you, me, your mom, my husband, your children’s teachers, and my neighbor all with the craving to be seen.

We were made to be seen.

Psalm 139:15 says, “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” From the beginning, we were seen — no wonder we still crave that feeling with which we were made.

And then we live in a world of enmeshed relationships where we take those unnamed (but strongly felt) desires into the relationships around us — needing to be seen and understood, but feeling mostly empty, still longing, reaching but blindly.

We cringe when it comes to desire, afraid to name it, and fearful if we do that it will never get met. But to avoid making our life a reactive response to this craving, we haveto name this desire.

Hagar said of God, “You are the God who sees me,” for she said: “I have now seen the One who sees me” (Genesis 16:13). I suspect her endurance through such a tumultuous path thrusted in front of her was not that people understood her tears, but that she saw the One who saw her.

The “you just don’t get it” that you muttered under your breath today could be a breadcrumb trail back to desire — a desire God wants to meet.

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Is it time to bury the dream?

(This might be an email to earmark and tuck away for the future, as this isn’t for everyone. Some of you are in the dream-forming years … as you need to be.)

Is it time to bury the dream? Ouch.

Nearly every set of eyes reading this sentence is connected to a heart laboring (in life and prayer and time and resources and energy) for something … important. In our twenties, we dreamed about building a connected and vibrant family, homes, grand ministry endeavors —changing the world for God, travel, new cars, and exciting career opportunities. In our thirties, forties, and beyond, our dreams gain greater traction in our reality — we dream about illness being healed, broken relationships mending, generational patterns of substance abuse ending, spouses returning to the Lord, and wayward children coming home.

Who wants to read an email that suggests we push those dreams six feet deep?

(But you’re still here.)

We scroll Instagram, Twitter, and even the chapter headers of books and podcast titles for inspirational soundbites to give us a little more fuel to keep going, keep dreaming, and keep praying for that one thing. We orbit around this dream with our life.

I have a few of these dreams, some more conscious than others. If I shared them with you, you’d applaud my pursuit — laying down my money, time, and energy for these one-day-maybe dreams. You’d understand the nights I wrestle into sleep with a knot in my stomach and wake to nausea as I remember the fight of my life. You’d identify with a woman selling all she has and giving all she is for these pursuits. You’d encourage my commitment to pray for the shift, the change for which my life is fighting.

Because we’re dreamers, we were made with an eye for heaven — a mind set upon what’s better, what’s much better, than what a Thursday at two o’clock in the afternoon of a waiting season can present.

But, as a friend asked me last month — a question not to be answered but to let niggle in my mind — I will ask you: “what if failure is part of God’s design?”

At thirty, I stood outside a storefront window, watching the life I wanted from the other side of the glass. Friend after friend after friend carrying their babies inside them, then in their arms, then letting them toddle at their feet. Time ticked on for them while it stood still for me and my dreams. And, of course, the most natural thing was to fight for what I didn’t have — to fight in the form of doctor visits, natural health remedies, and … prayer. Aren’t dreams for the chasing?

Fifteen years later, I find another storefront window of which I’m on the other side — dreaming, imagining, watching others live what I want — and I’m awakening to the reality that some dreams aren’t meant to be chased but instead buried.

Fifteen years later, with a house full of children and, thus, a heart full of different dreams, I’m finding the narrative of scripture to be one where some dreams die and … yet their holders survive. Rather, it is a narrative in which dreams do die, and yet the people who hold them slowly (ever-so-slowly) are “recalled to life,” to use Dickens’ words.

Being known, studied and seen, and cherished — the most intimate sense of forever-and-always-never-broken belonging — has its inception at the cross. Not His, but ours.

We know this. You know this. You read these verses when you decided to start following God. Still, whether it was because of our youthful idealism or all the sound bites between then and now that boast of a bigger and better life, we forget that the pathway to the most joyous, expansive, and elaborate living starts at a gravesite.

And today, I’m proposing that it might be at the gravesite of one of your dreams that you find the thing you want (even more than the fruition of that dream).

You and I wouldn’t be the first to be invited to lay down the very thing we were confident would give us life, that beautiful, God-handed-to-us dream. Abraham walked Mount Moriah with a knife in his hand and the child of his dreams beside him at the request of God. Mary watched the son of her youth — the boy who broke open her womb and made her a mother — die a gruesome death. Paul lost the respect of his pedigree, the one he’d built his life pursuing.

And yet each of those stories has elements of the life I want and the life you want.

Some of us spend years or even decades fighting for the dream that is best placed in our story at a gravesite — but we’ll never know that (we’ll never know how powerful that burial might be for the rest of our lives) until we consider that maybe, as my friend said, “failure is a part of God’s design.” And some of us are bone-tired from keeping a dream alive, when we might find the relief we’ve searched for in all the other places by finally putting it to rest.

Sometimes our most noble-seeming pursuits — our persistent prayers — are really just masking that we’re scared out of our minds to let a dream die because we can’t imagine ourselves or our lives without it.

But He can.

Imagine with me today and ask yourself this question:

Might the thing I’ve refused to relinquish, even in the name of faith and hope, best be laid six feet under? Might there be another dream on the other side of this one … after this burial?

You and I both gasp: letting go of this dream might seem counter to all you have let yourself know. It sure does for me.

The paradox of faith: the death of what we cannot imagine losing and are spending our sleeping and waking hours to keep alive has the power to unlock the life we so desperately want.

{For more like this, I write a bit more candidly and a lot more frequently in my private writing space SOAR. I love the people over there – I suspect you might, too.}

Until next month,

Sara

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“New year, new day” and other unhelpful advice as we cross the threshold into 2023

I love (almost) everything about the turning of a calendar.

Whether a new school year in August or a new calendar year in January, I drool at the thought of new pens and journals and other (both unnecessary and necessary) paper products.

Last week I cleaned my desk and retreated for 36 hours to close the page on the last year and run my palm along the spine to flatten a crisp new one. I tossed old, broken Christmas ornaments and strands of lights of which half or more had gone dark. I culled through our basement book closet and took the books, lined in stacks from little (and big) hands that couldn’t figure out which shelf they belonged, and put them back in their place. I bought ten new bins from IKEA to organize the books I refuse now to toss.

Everything felt new after last week’s spring cleaning in winter. Except …

Except … me.

You see, 2022 held some deeply jarring unexpected elements for us. And I’m still fumbling to get my footing here, unsure and weak-limbed. In early December, the idealism of my twenties spoke louder than God and convinced me that this rough spot would surely end before the ball dropped and 2023 would be fresh.

Except it didn’t.

My life is much longer than a Hallmark movie, and though the first Christmas began to make everything right in the world, we won’t see its full implications until we cross into eternity.

January 1st was not all that different than December 31st. Typing this seems quite cynical, but I wonder if we need to stay a bit more within the fluid nature of the unfinished to see the Jesus whose friends fell asleep during their last time alone with him before he died.

When we first adopted, a common phrase we heard in adoption circles was this: “healing begins to take root when the number of years your children are in your home exceeds the years they lived outside your home.” I never questioned this. I recited it to others and vaguely marked the calendar.

Unexamined then, I think, now: how silly. As if some magical internal thermometer measured “done” on the day one of our children, adopted at 5, reached 10. And then, I thought, what made me so ready to receive (and then give) that advice?

We all want “done” with what feels hard.

We make up dozens of micro-rules like this, ever-angling towards a neat and tidy, healed and whole life.

We feel squirmy with the unfinished.

It’s part of the incredible loneliness I’ve known a handful of times. When struggle lasts longer than the expected expiration, we tire of ourselves still in it, and quickly duck from others who we assume would tire of us. Whether another’s exasperation or our anticipation of it, loneliness takes root when we think, “surely none of us have patience for this.”

Could it be that our triumphalist mentality — so sure of the next breakthrough coming in the Lord — is generated more from our lack of ability (or desire) to “suffer long”than it does from the Bible’s narrative?

I’ve become leery these days of words like “breakthrough” and phrases like “I’m never going back” and “everything has changed” — not because I don’t think there are roads to Damascus yet again, but because they are the miraculous exception, not the norm. They are the rare interregnum in a life lived steadily in one direction, growing in inches, not feet.

I’m leery because I wonder if some of that reach for the “breakthrough” reveals our discomfort with staying in pain and tension (the pain that often disciples a life) more than it illustrates the heart of God … who let His people wait hundreds of years on a promise.

Something about staying in a place longer than we want makes us shudder at the ghosts of all the things we want to avoid, ignore, not face. So we slap a spiritual phrase on it and pray for the new day, the breakthrough, the shift – giving all of our energy to when we get to leave behind what’s hard.

I often wonder about the person leaving the prayer meeting, after so many prayed for his freedom from debilitating headaches or her healing from infertility or her relief from her auto-immune flare, who wakes up the next day with the same symptoms. Does he or she have a category for “not yet” as not merely “not yet” but instead a key component to developing deep spiritual roots — a necessary part of discipleship?

Learning to stay in what’s hard is the mark of substance. I write this and I cringe — it’s so easy to type and at times dreadfully painful to live.

The best husbands, wives, sisters, daughters, mothers, fathers, and friends are the ones that have learned the laborious but prolific practice of staying long (of long-suffering).

It’s a lost art, this ability to name the squirrely-ness and, rather than let it drive us to spiritualize the next-best thing, the shift around the corner, the big and better of God in our lives, we linger with it a little longer.

It’s the paradox of God. He saved the world in one weekend but also after thousands of years.

We serve the God of the new day, who also tarries.

I can spend a lifetime seeking the power of His hand or knowing, secretly but with familiarity, the rise and fall of His chest as He breathes.

If your new day didn’t come last week, perhaps it’s better that way.

{I write more frequently and more candidly and film some videos with Nate, as well, in my private writing space, SOAR.}

Until next month,

Sara

The post “New year, new day” and other unhelpful advice as we cross the threshold into 2023 appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

Rather than press through and push harder, what if you …

A few instances in the past week left me feeling especially vulnerable:

Disclosing some hard things to a friend, receiving pained words from a child, a new unknown surfacing in our future.

Enough of these in a short period have me paying attention to how I respond to vulnerability.

My mouth feels dry. My heart picks up pace. Like mindlessly flipping through the pages of a catalog, my mind scans through possible pathways out of this vulnerable state. I replay the conversation, wondering if I could’ve said it differently. I imagine future scenarios, thinking that planning for the future means a secure future.

All of this can happen in 3 minutes or less. And then I’m on to the rest of my day: picking up legos and pulling the meat out of the freezer for dinner and watering the half-dead succulents.

I’m not too fond of feeling vulnerable — that feeling of exposing a fresh wound to the simplest elements of wind and water. I’ve written several chapters in my books about vulnerability as our inroad to conversation with God, and yet I still notice how much I resist it.

Several times a week: I feel vulnerable — and I push through and past that feeling.

But recently I saw His invitation through my three-year-old. Virginia holds no pretense. She cries a few times a day, though I still call her my “bundle of joy.” The child is full of delight, but she feels. She checks in with me minutes after Nate gets her out of bed and dresses her. She climbs into my lap without asking. She stubs her toe, falls off of her bike, or sees a flash of lightning outside her window, and her first response is to shriek, “Mommy!” or “Daddy!”

Her world is tethered to me: out to explore, back to Mom, out to experience, return to Mom’s lap, out to chase curiosity, exhale in Mom’s safe arms.

Virginia is vulnerable all day long. Bumblebees and thunderclouds and rickety tricycle wheels disrupt her felt strength. So, she returns … to Nate or me. Every time.

She hasn’t learned to drive through, to ignore what scares her or hurts her.

I might not be so suspicious of bolstering up in the face of vulnerability if I didn’t have four children we adopted, whose little years didn’t include that tether. Thunderclouds may have sent the same panic through their toddler-spines, but without a course of action for those vulnerable moments … they flailed.

Kind of like you and me … maybe?

During a time where most everyone in your world and mine is newly vulnerable in some way, I suggest this: rather than push harder, double-down, press through … what if we cry?

Bite your lip, sit on the floor, and let yourself unfurl.

Lay on your bed and feel what you’ve been racing to un-feel.

Open your Bible and ask Him questions*, rather than coaching yourself with what you think are His answers.

“And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3

Were we ever intended to grow out of the vulnerability that childhood proposes — the humility of needing a Father?

I figured that if I write all these book chapters about vulnerability and meeting God in our weak places — and STILL I need a fresh reminder that I am like my three-year-old and He is offering to hold me tight … you might need the same reminder.

Vulnerability (oh that buzz word) only becomes a gift when it brings us back to His lap.

Vulnerability disarms me so that I can find Him – the safest thing I will ever know.

When You Find Yourself In Winter

A tree doesn’t survive the winter without healthy roots. Neither do we.

I remember that bleak February morning when my husband and I loaded up our car and drove through the stripped-bare forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains to move into my parents’ basement. Everything felt cold, including my heart. Weeks earlier, my dad was diagnosed with a fast-growing brain cancer which we were all still dazed by.

I left their house only for brisk runs through Ohio’s suburban sprawl, and I came home to more winter as I watched my dad decline. I couldn’t escape this season. I had entered into a spiritual winter.

What I didn’t know then was that this was a holy winter. God was doing something underground that I couldn’t see.

{Continue reading more of my piece on DesiringGod here.}

The post When You Find Yourself In Winter appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

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How To Keep Your Heart Alive

At sixteen it all seemed so obvious. You either had a cross around your neck and a Bible in your locker, or a drink in your hand on the weekends. Back then, it was follow Jesus or party. My best friend and I slid each other Bible verses on scraps of paper in between class, just to remind one another to “stay the course.” Both of us had had our typical high school experience interrupted by this God-man — the wide-eyed nature of young adulthood was still working its way through us.

Walking across the stage, receiving my diploma and still professing Jesus felt like a tremendous mile-marker. I’d survived high school and was still reading my Bible.

Twenty-plus years later and the threats against the vibrancy of my faith are far more subtle.

But they’re there.

Read the rest of this post over here…

The post How To Keep Your Heart Alive appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

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The Illusion of Fame

My sister was on homecoming court two years in a row.

For many, that means nothing, but when you grow up in middle America (where the best of life happens under the Friday night lights), homecoming court makes celebrities out of seventeen year-olds.

I was in the seventh grade then. And I knew I wanted to follow her. This was before she breezed through college and landed a lifetime career and found her husband. In the seventh grade, I saw my sister sitting next to the cutest boy in the school, atop a decorated convertible, circling the football stadium for the whole town to applaud, and I wanted to be her.

Really, I wanted her fame.

Except, I never made it to the final five when I was seventeen. My friends rode the convertibles with the cute boys while I leaned against the fence that lined the stadium track and watched. Celebrity evaded me.

I’ve since distilled high school down to one box of photo albums, varsity letters, yearbooks and an old pair of Birkenstocks, but the memory of my friends circling the football field while their names reverberated through the PA system into the autumn-night sky still hangs in my memory.

Continue reading here on  The Edges Collective…

The post The Illusion of Fame appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

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