No Vanilla, only Rocky Road for me: thoughts on living

Last week, I encouraged you to embrace fearlessness. This week I lived it wide open, and it made my heart smile, fully alive and free. I realized that to live fully alive is to embrace pain. An abundant life is not a numb life. It is full of emotion, pain, beauty, and all that is life.

This month I’ve read several dystopian novels – 1984, The Giver, and Fahrenheit 451. What each one of those books have in common is the idea that a “vanilla” life is a life not really lived – it is a life numb to really knowing and understanding the beauty and the pain life gives us. If we decide to make our lives safe, well, then we miss really living.

• In 1984, this was accomplished by Big Brother who watches everyone and makes sure everyone does and thinks exactly as the government wants them to do and think.
• In The Giver, society had “advanced” until no one saw colors, birthed babies on their own (this job was disgraceful), felt real emotion or pain, or cared if they euthanized babies or elderly, or even knew what animals were. It was a society free from fear, but it was people numb to knowing LIFE.
• In Fahrenheit 451, all books are banned and firemen exist to start fires rather than to put them out. It was a world so numbed to living that the characters only real friends were virtual ones existing in their tele-walls. People are so numb from not knowing beauty or truth that they had rather kill themselves in order to feel or to really live.

In my life this week, there are a few reasons why I was embracing pain. It’s the never-ending wrestling I do:

1. I worry that the Gospel is being stripped in certain segments of my life, and I don’t like that.
2. I have felt a pull to go to Uganda, and although my church was planning to go, it isn’t any longer.
3. As I cleaned the attic, I had to confront my story again, and I felt like my life story progress was slow to none.
4. As I doubted my own personal story, I began to inadvertently doubt Him and the story He is producing in me. “Maybe He doesn’t hear or answer my prayers,” I said to myself.
5. I may have overreacted to these thoughts and let God have my fears in a less than godly way to do so.

Needless to say, God spoke to me right in the midst of the wrestling, and that’s why I went to Southside Tuesday morning. My church is planning to start a church in Southside, which is a part of Birmingham known for its history, trendiness, homelessness, homosexuality, partying, liberality, and proximity to UAB, and I felt drawn to pray for it.

It was the praying that took me on an adventure in the snow, that reminded me that to write I absolutely have to live.

It was the praying that led me to pray all day, as I abandoned my car, walked, and hitchhiked home to recover my babies. I’d been wanting an adventure, and I got one. I felt a myriad of things during that time, but as is usually the case during the pinnacles of my faith walk, my fear was turned into trust, faith, and hope, and I saw the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living (Psalm 27:13).

I’d have to say that no one would want the Snowpocalypse 2014 to happen at all, and maybe no one would ask for it again if we were given re-dos. People suffered, were stranded from their families, lost their cars into water or fire or just simply wrecked them. People did not know if they would survive the night in the cold as they slept in their cars. Some people died.

Despite these circumstances, we saw beauty in the midst of the pain and struggle. No one would know their inner strength or weakness in quite the same way. No one would know the way that a calamity brings people together. Without this circumstance we would be stripped the joy of the reunions and the pain of death. For a moment, we saw whether we were heroes or saviors, and we could all savor the One Savior when we grasped the real story of the day. We all lived “rocky road” lives in Alabama this week, and I for one, think we were better for having done so.

God seemed to be working in the midst of my story all day in the midst of the snow storm – there is so much I could tell you about the events of the day that would clutter this post. There was nothing on my mind but making sure there was someone to care for my babies, seeing them safe, and taking them home. In my story, we all arrived at home within 5 minutes of one another, after Daniel walked 5 miles from his office to Lisabeth and then home. But not everyone’s story was wrapped in a neat bow like mine was. I couldn’t help but think of those kids and families in Africa that I am so desperate to see – we suffered for a short while, and they suffer every day.

Jeff Goins posted a quote by Anne Lamott this week,

“This business of being a writer is ultimately about asking yourself, ‘How alive am I willing to be?'”

I can say I want to be all in – alive, letting the fear be stripped away. This former good girl set free doesn’t want to live a “vanilla” life – a life that is stripped from flavor because fear holds it down. She does not want to go back to wearing the chains of legalism and good girl-ness ever again. I’ve been fearful that some of the changes I’ve seen lately in my sphere would cause more “vanilla” living and less “rocky road” living. No vanilla, only rocky road for me. A dystopian life is an unlived life. This week’s events have set me free from the fear trying to chain me again. The fear that says we must be cookie cutter images of faith. After all, my Savior bled and died so that I may live, not numb and same as everyone else, but abundant and free (John 10:10).

How have you been encouraged to be fearless this week? I’d love to hear from you.

*P.S. The “vanilla” life was coined by a friend of mine. You should know that I hold no bias to the flavor vanilla, and I make no judgment on whether or not your life is vanilla flavored. Only you know if you are embracing the fear and moving past it or staying mired in the safe.