Tag: Healing

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Judas’ kiss: Lessons in betrayal and life

It was one of those “punch in the gut” nights that will likely be etched in my memory forever. One where, toward the end of the night, all I could do was laugh at the absolute absurdity of the situation at hand to remind myself that laughter and joy still existed, even though the darkness seemed to be winning.

I can still feel the way the bathtub dug into the back of my ribs as I sat outside it, wedged on the floor in the corner of a bathroom, stroking the hair of the violently ill, brokenhearted girl in my lap. After a few minutes, my laughter faded and I could hear my neighbor sitting outside the room, playing her guitar and beating back the spiritual darkness the way the Lord has gifted her most clearly– line by line, worship song by worship song. I leaned my head against the bathroom wall and sang along with her until I was crying so hard that words wouldn’t come out anymore.

I cried a lot that night.

I cried because my students were clearly hurting after the night’s events and their pain broke my heart. I cried because I was afraid, both of the natural consequences of my students’ actions and because I was afraid to be the “mom” of the situation– the one who would have to lovingly and logically discipline the students I adore. I cried because my expectations for the night had been broken, then seemingly lit on fire. But above all, I cried because the trust and relationships that I had been working to develop with my students had been shattered by lies and poor choices, and I felt incredibly betrayed.

Since coming to the TLC, I’d been warned of the “eye-twitch moment”, aka the moment when you lose control of your body from stress, exhaustion, or sensory overload, and your body starts to revolt against itself. That night, as I sat squished in the corner of a bathroom, holding one student and staring into the confused eyes of another who had come in to check on us, I blew past the infamous eye-twitch and graduated to the full-body rage tremor. My heart was indignant and overflowing with every emotion possible, but the only thing I could articulate was that I was hurt. And when I’m hurt, my Aztec heritage kicks in and my immediate emotional reaction is almost always ugly and hostile.

I wanted to scream, but instead I bit my lip, moved my eyes from those of my student to the floor, and in my best restrained mom voice, said, “Someday we’re gonna need to have a conversation about what happened tonight, but now is not that day. You’ve betrayed my trust and hurt me really deeply. You are forgiven and loved… but you should go…”.

That night, after the situation was mostly diffused and my students were in their respective beds, I knelt in my boss’ living room and bawled. “I. Don’t. Understand.” “I can’t trust them anymore.” “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to give up on them, but I feel so betrayed. I can’t take it.” “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.” Fragmented sentences and bodily fluids poured out of me while my boss patiently listened and handed me Kleenexes.

“I know you’re really hurt by what happened tonight, but our calling is to go the extra mile with those Jesus has brought to TLC. And that’s what we need to do.” My boss gently responded over my heaving sobs before going on to explain a few practical ways that we could “go the extra mile” with them.

I sat and listened, seething and angry at my students, and angry at the ugliness of my heart while he spoke. When he was done, I managed to sputter out, “I CAN’T go anywhere with them right now, let alone go an extra mile; I don’t want to…”

Betrayal at its core is a break of relationship and trust. And it sucks.

Betrayal makes us indignant in our woundedness. It causes us to go to the darkest, most stubborn places in our hearts, sit down, and throw a baby fit. And that’s exactly what I did.

That night as I knelt on that floor and talked with my boss, I spun into myself, dug my heels in, and internally refused to move forward in trying to rebuild those relationships– essentially becoming the antithesis of the calling Jesus has given those who have felt betrayal within ministry (or in life in general).

I couldn’t see it as my emotion and exhaustion clouded my brain that night in December, but I was reminded in the days following that Jesus is a God who understands betrayal on the deepest level possible.

After all, Jesus was betrayed by one of his closest confidants, someone in His inner circle. He knows what it is to have His carefully built trust shattered. Within that, He showed His followers how we’re supposed to respond to betrayal through His interactions with Judas. (And last time I checked, His response wasn’t to throw a baby fit, cry, or purely dwell in the betrayal itself. Not that I would ever do any of those things… Ahem; moving on…)

Jesus responded to betrayal with grace and love. From the dawn of time, Jesus knew that Judas would betray Him, but that betrayal wasn’t without purpose; it was so that His Father’s perfect plan for reconciliation of man and God could be carried out.

Let me repeat that– Jesus knew Judas was going to betray Him from the get go, and yet He invited him into His life and His heart anyway. Not only did Jesus take a life changing risk in building trust that He knew would one day be broken and lead to His death, but He treated Judas with just as much love and grace as He treated His other disciples. So much so in fact, that when Jesus said that one of the people at the last supper was going to betray Him, everyone began asking who the traitor was.

Had Jesus treated Judas, the traitor, any differently than the other disciples I feel like that moment around the table would’ve included a painfully obvious (and awkward) shift of everyone’s eyes to Judas. Alas, it was a mystery who the traitor was until Judas showed up in the garden of Gethsemane with the Roman soldiers, servants, and Pharisees.

Jesus loved Judas well until the bitter(sweet) end and at a great cost.

But because He was just as human as He is God, Jesus also experienced emotion, there by reminding us that the pain of betrayal is real and something to be taken to God in prayer, rather than something to be brushed aside. We see in Luke 22:42 as Jesus called out to God, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” that there was agony in Jesus’ knowledge that He was about to be betrayed. But the story doesn’t end with Jesus sitting in His emotion or agony; it “ends” (and I use the term ends in the loosest way possible here) with loving sacrifice in the midst of betrayal.

A month later, I’m able to acknowledge that the feelings that accompanied my betrayal were completely valid, but I also realize that dwelling in my emotions and battle scars cannot be the way this specific story ends either.

At the end of the day, I have to apply the Gospel to feelings of disappointment and betrayal when they come. Shaking them off and expecting them to disappear won’t work. Dwelling in them and refusing to move forward in relationship with my students doesn’t do anyone any good. And withholding future love because I’m afraid my trust will be betrayed again? That might be the easiest way out, but it isn’t what Jesus has called me to as His follower.

Jen Hatmaker says it so well in her book Interrupted: When Jesus Wrecks Your Comfortable Christianity:

“Jesus came to the foulest, filthiest place possible (earth), a place full of ungrateful, self-destructive people who would betray Him far more than they’d love Him (a whole planet of Judases). He became the offering for people who would slander His name with ferocity, yet His grace was theirs for the asking until they drew their last breaths, even if all they could offer Him was a lifetime of hatred and one moment of repentance.

We don’t get to opt out of this gospel. We don’t get to opt out of living on mission because we might not be appreciated. We’re not allowed to neglect the oppressed because we have reservations about their discernment. We cannot deny love because it might be despised or misunderstood.”

When the pain of betrayal comes, we have to look to Jesus and remember that ours is a God who understands betrayal, yet chooses to love anyway.

In fact, He chooses to love me, even though I kiss His cheek every morning and manage to wander away and betray Him for prettier, shinier, “more exciting” gods by lunch time every day. Yet His love for me is constant and perfect, unfailing and unafraid of my imperfection.

Jesus never promises us that we won’t get wounded in doing His work, but He does promise that those wounds and imperfect moments will become beautiful and for His glory if we give them to Him, (even if we don’t get to see this in this lifetime).

“As I have loved you, love one another.”

John 13:34

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How do you decorate gang warfare for Christmas?

Last Christmas was a mess— a really dark, emotional mess.

On the morning of December 10th I made great plans to sweep the brokenness and messiness of holiday life under a rug, slap a tree on top of it all, and have a Merry-freaking-Christmas. My students and I were going to be happy and we were going to enjoy Christmas, dang it! (Can you see the crazy, plastered smile on my face? No? Just ask one of my DSS girls… I’m sure they can imitate it pretty well given how many times they’ve seen my crazy-teacher-eyes around the holidays over the years.)

The very same day that I made this proclamation of well intentioned, forced joy, my Christmas dreams were crushed by the murder of one of my students.

Losing Johnny broke me, and I subsequently kinda gave up on Christmas for a while last year. I battled between depression, and the urge to fight my feelings and simply “fix” said depression. I so badly wanted Christmas cookies and cheerful music to fix everything like it always seemed to in those stupid ABC Family Christmas movies. So, I tried to force a few cheerful traditions as an attempt to pull myself out of the darkness and pain. But the truth was, while they distracted me temporarily, none of those things could fix my aching heart or the hearts of the students around me. If anything, my inability to fix the situation just shoved me further into an emotional meltdown.

I'm not even kidding you; Christmas was so broken last year that even my Christmas cookies came out in pieces.
I’m not even kidding you; Christmas was so broken last year that even my Christmas cookies came out looking like a mess.

A year later, life looks drastically different in the weeks leading up to Christmas. (Can I get a hallelujah?!)

But even now, twelve months and twenty-five hundred miles removed from the events of last Christmas season, my heart still hurts. It hurts because I still don’t know how to appropriately grieve the death of an eighteen year old who was trying to turn his life around. (And I feel stupid– like after a year of wrestling with the consequences and darkness of gang warfare, I should have this figured out…)

My heart hurts because even in the middle of nowhere, I’ve got a lot of really real crap going on in my heart, and I know you probably do too.

It’s the holidays, and therefore I’m dealing with my annual child-of-divorce, “I’m-going-to-have-to-pick-which-side-of-the-family-to-disappoint-on-Christmas” struggle. I’m wrestling with a deep, selfish desire to avoid the conflict and pain I know I’ll be confronted with upon my return to Denver. I’m struggling to reconcile the fact that when I leave this village and return to the safe arms of my loved ones in three weeks, I’ll be sending my TLC students back to unsafe spaces to fend off the darkness on their own for a month.

I know I’m not alone in the mess. There are real things that we’re all struggling with, and newsflash: the struggles (at least my struggles) don’t ever seem to care whether it’s Christmas time or the middle of July.

Within these weird struggles of life I’m left with a lot of questions. Questions like:

If the pain of losing Johnny isn’t going to go away, even a year later, how do I decorate gang warfare for Christmas? How do I hide the pain that it has brought to my Street School family, or the unrelated pain that I’m feeling in my heart because of family struggles and relational breakdown? Should I even try to hide it at all?

Should I try to smother my heartbreak by wrapping it in Christmas lights and pretending that it doesn’t exist? That seems to be close to how the world tells me I should handle this internal battle, yet that “solution” doesn’t sit right in my soul…

But I think this is what we, as Christians, feel like we have to do.

Within the church we feel this need to be perfect, especially around the holidays. But I, for one, can’t be perfect; I’m completely incapable of it. And I’m sick of feeling like there’s something wrong with me for wanting to be real.

Yet even within my craving for authenticity, I still hesitate to bring up the places I’m struggling. After all, I don’t want to be the one to ruin someone else’s perceived holiday perfection with my mess. None of us want to be the broken, hurting ones in the midst of a season that seems to be the antithesis of such behavior.

There isn’t space for real life or real pain in the way our culture does Christmas. I think that’s such a shame because I’m pretty sure God doesn’t have His calendar divided into “times that are appropriate to discuss hard things” and “times that are to be devoted only to the drinking of hot chocolate, wearing trendy/ugly sweaters, and listening to Michael Buble’s Christmas album in the car”.

No. In His calendar, there is a time of longing for, and a time of receiving Jesus through His birth.

And friends, this season—advent—is that season of longing.

We all have really deep longings that match our questions and pain, and advent should be a season, just like any other, where we can express those within the safety of the church without someone trying to sweep us under the rug and shove a shiny Christmas tree on top of us and our problems.

Advent is a season devoted to waiting and wrestling, longing and hoping. It was not created to be a season devoted to aesthetic perfection.

This world isn’t perfect; I don’t think you need a church calendar to tell you that. But I think that it’s okay to let advent be a season of recognizing just how broken this world is. It’s okay to talk about the imperfections in our lives, because through acknowledging them, we can more deeply acknowledge our need for Christ and His coming–for the renewal that only He could bring to our brokenness, both through His birth in that manger two thousand years ago and in His someday second coming.

This advent and Christmas season, I pray that the church will be a people who make space for the brokenness (and broken people) in our lives, knowing that Christ has done the same for humanity. May we be a people who speak truth and light into the dark, complicated places of our lives, together. And as we wrestle with our brokenness and as creation groans, may we see Hope within poor circumstance, rather than try to forget that brokenness exists.

May we look to the soon-coming Christ, the reason for our confidence and Hope for redemption, deeply knowing that because of what He has done for us in His birth, death, and resurrection, that our sufferings will be lifted one day, for He is making all things new.

May we be a people that sees the Light in the darkness, acknowledging both, but embracing the truth that Jesus came to be the light that could never be extinguished.
As I light the advent candles in my home, know that I will always light them for you too, Johnny, just like we did in La Alma Park last December at your candlelight vigil. You are not forgotten. You never could be; you simply shined too brightly with that goofy smile of yours. Thank you for teaching so many of us what Light can look like in abject darkness.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great Light; those who dwelt in the land of deep darkness, on them has Light shone.”

(Isaiah 9:2)

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I believe Love (and tacos) can conquer all

“Kacy, sometimes you open your mouth and say something, and I gasp. Because you get it. You’ve been there. Somehow you’ve lived parts of my story I thought no one person would ever understand.”

It was ironic to read those words in a note from one of my students this last week, given the fact that one of my worst fears in moving to Alaska was that I would never be able to relate to my new students. After all, what could I—a Brown, wild child, ex-hoodrat—possibly have in common with Native Alaskan teenagers from bush villages?

I was terrified coming here. I was scared that we would never find common ground, they wouldn’t like Mexican food… Or even worse, that my students simply wouldn’t like me. Could an approval junkie like me handle (and live in) that kind of rejection?

By the grace of God, my students and I have found more common ground than I could have ever hoped for in the last two months. (And after introducing my students to Mexican food and explaining that you don’t put soy sauce on Spanish rice, they’ve taken to my cooking. Even if they still spell quesadillas “Kacy-diaz”. Baby steps, right?)

Every night once my students are in bed, I lay down and scroll through a few online newspapers and my social media streams. In the last two weeks, I’ve watched in horror as terrorist attacks and subsequent political debates have unfolded on my tiny iPhone screen. As I lay under my blankets, in my warm bed in the middle-of-nowhere Alaska, my heart breaks for the world that we live in.

After all, I live in what could arguably be one of the safest places in the world.

Every morning I wake up in a village where the post master knows me by name and calls me to tell me when I have a package to pick up. I live in a place so safe and so quaint that if I’m hiking when the “grocery plane” lands, my neighbors put away my groceries for me; it’s just what we do here because this village is a family who lives for Jesus.

It kills me to read the news and be reminded that this is not the way of the world.

It pains my sappy heart to know that fear is driving hatred, racism, exclusion, and perpetuating foreign and domestic terrorism. But I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked… after all, as Carl Medearis (one of my favorite “Christian” authors) says, perfect fear casts out all love. Oh, wait… No, something is wrong there.

That isn’t the way of Jesus…

No, Jesus confronts fear with His perfect love. In fact, He confronted more than fear in His life (and death). Jesus confronted racism, sexism, pain, and shame all throughout His earthly ministry, but He did so specifically when He shared the Gospel with a Samaritan woman at a well in John 4:

“So Jesus came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as He was from His journey, was sitting beside the well around the sixth hour.

A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ The Samaritan woman said to Him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?’ (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him and He would have given you Living Water.’ The woman said to Him, ‘Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get such Living Water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us this well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock. Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come to draw water.’” (John 4:5-15)

Jesus challenged man-made boundaries of racism here by talking to a Samaritan. *Gasp!* Then He got really risqué and pushed aside cultural taboos by crossing gender barriers and talking to a Samaritan woman. Even His disciples knew this was a big deal: “Just then, His disciples came back. They marveled that He was talking with a woman, but no one said, ’What do you seek?’ or, ‘Why are you talking with her?’” (John 4:27) They marveled at the fact that Jesus was loving someone so different from Himself… so foreign, so “lowly”.

Now, there’s speculation over whether this woman truly was an unlucky widow (several times over) or whether she was an adulterer or prostitute; We can speculate all we want on the facts here, but we will likely never know this side of heaven.

As a fellow woman, I can deduce however, that this woman likely wrestled with fear and shame if she had gone through that much deep, relational upheaval in her lifetime. And Jesus, knowing the depths of her heart more than I could ever begin to speculate, still chose to enter into her fear, shame, and brokenness to offer her the Kingdom of God anyway, even with the complicating circumstances of her nationality and gender.

I read this chunk of scripture and it causes me to pause. Every. Stinkin’. Time.

If this is the way of Jesus… And Christians are followers of Jesus… And I consider myself to be a Christian… What am I doing? What am I valuing in life if I find myself unwilling to cross uncomfortable barriers to love the ones He loved first?

If we as Christians claim to follow Christ, but are unwilling to follow Him across political, social, and man-made lines today in 2015, we are following something… but I dare say it isn’t Jesus.

Let me say it again: Jesus confronted the brokenness of the world with Love.

In the midst of the horrific headlines regarding terrorism and the political debate the rages on over the futures of refugees– real human beings— what our world needs is the love of Christ.

We don’t need another political mandate, stricter man-made laws, or bloodshed to retaliate for bloodshed.

We need to love.

And we will never be able to love those whom we are afraid (or unwilling) to get to know. The Lord has shown me this first hand time and time again through scripture, and through moving me to the middle of the wilderness to do life with people that I thought couldn’t be more different from me, but whom He adores.

“Those people” whoever “they” are?

“They” are beautiful.

“Their” culture is rich with lessons, just waiting to be learned and loved.

“They” have been created in the image of God, just like you and me.

“They” need Jesus just as badly as you and me.

(“They” probably like Mexican food just as much as you, my students, and I do. [Just sayin’… I believe Jesus and tacos can unite the world…])

We’re all human, which unfortunately means we’re all a bit screwed up. But Christ came in PERFECT LOVE and died for all of us, that we might turn to Him and die to our sinful selves. To die to ourselves is to live for Him, and I don’t know about you, but it seems like living for the Jesus of the Bible means to love the people He has placed around us and love them as we love ourselves.

Scripture tells us the truths that His perfect love casts out fear and His strength is perfected in our weakness. But we, as the followers of Christ Jesus, have to be willing to humble ourselves and be His hands and feet; we have to be willing to invite in our poor and needy neighbors– those who live right down the road and (hold onto your seats) those who are foreign. 

Jesus was not an example of discrimination or exclusion, and thus I struggle to believe that we should walk those paths.

What would it look like for you to truly love “those” people today? (“Those people”– whoever they are– probably aren’t as scary as you think. Trust me; I live in a house full of people I was terrified to meet.)

“By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in Him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.”

“There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear.”

(1 John 3:18, 4:18)

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Becoming Real

BecomingReal“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” –The Velveteen Rabbit

Every Monday afternoon, my TLC girls and I have a “house meeting”. Because I’m possibly the least meeting oriented person on this planet, our meeting essentially consists of us all cozying up on the living room couches with a cup of tea and our favorite blanket. We talk about everything from practical items like the chore chart and groceries, to prayer requests and where we’ve seen God move in our hearts and lives that week.

The reality of these meetings is that they’ve been some of the most mundane moments with my students thus far—a heartbreaking reality check for someone who loves nothing more than chatting about Jesus over hot beverages.

More often than not, I ask questions and then sit smiling– like Dora the Explorer, awaiting an answer that more than likely isn’t coming.

“How can we pray for each other this week?” …Crickets. (Sometimes an awkward smile, if I’m lucky.)

I generally wait a few moments, offer a prayer request of my own… and then wait some more… until the silence becomes unbearable.

“Where have you seen God work in your life this week?” I trudge on. No response.

“Or maybe, would one of you risk sharing what you’ve learned in Bible this week?” Not. A. Dang. Thing.

That is essentially how our first two weeks around here went…

At every meal and house meeting, I felt like I was stuck playing the world’s worst game of 20 Questions with a mildly captive audience. (Captive being the key word here, since I think my students realized that they were gonna have to interact with me if they wanted me to feed them.)

It was rough.

“If someone other than me doesn’t start talking in this house soon, I think I’m gonna lose it! I’m gonna throw myself off a bridge or something.” I vented to my best friend in Denver last weekend.

“Well, lucky for you, you live in a village and there probably aren’t bridges for a few hundred miles.” Eyeroll. Thanks, Kitty.

It was with this salty attitude that I began my day on Monday. I’m not gonna lie—I was whole-heartedly dreading our house meeting that evening. Just the thought of another round of 20 Questions made me want to keel over. It felt like this job was going to be the death of me.

I sent my girls off to work with a smile early Monday afternoon. As soon as they walked out the door, I proceeded to dramatically put my face down on the dining room table and tried to resist the urge to slam my forehead into it. Realizing that I drastically needed an attitude adjustment (and to pray through my cranky heart), I shoved the little Velveteen Rabbit notecard that a friend from home gave me in my hoodie pocket, laced up my sneakers, and I went for a run.

I ran down the airplane runway, through the creek that bounds our village, and took off through the woods grumbling and grousing at God the whole way. (Yes, family members, I had my bear spray with me… Everyone can calm down.)

What the actual HECK, Lord?! Why did you bring me all this way just to put me in a completely silent house? What are you doing?! Is this real life? I could be perfectly ignored by teenagers in Denver AND not be 2,500 miles away from home (AND ice cream). This just can’t be reality here.

The trail wore thin and spit me out on the banks of the Tanalian River. Mildly pissed, I plopped down on the rocks, threw my shoes behind me, and took out the little white notecard from my pocket. As the frigid river water rushed over my feet, I read and re-read the ending of the Velveteen Rabbit.

“I am making all things new.”

As I read the words on the notecard in my hand, Revelation 21:5 rang in the back of my mind—likely because I had just included this verse in my teaching of the story of Joseph last week in Bible class. I sat and thought back to how God had turned Joseph being sold into slavery into the beautiful salvation of an entire nation. Joseph had real struggles, yet God redeemed his pain and made a new plan for generations to come.

In the strangest of ways, God used the story of Joseph to remind me that the pain and loss in the story of the Velveteen Rabbit was turned into something beautiful and new too. When the little saggy, eyeless rabbit had been thrown to the burn pile after scarlet fever ravaged his best friend’s home, the fairy turned him into a new creation—a Real rabbit.

I sat for a few seconds and considered the sweetness of the children’s story that I’ve grown to love— the beautiful redemption of becoming Real because of Love…

My emotional daze wore off quickly as a four-wheeler blazed out of the trees behind me and scared me back into reality. “Buhhhhh, I know…” I sighed under my breath while tugging my socks and shoes back onto my damp feet. “I know You are making all things new, God. I know You’re making my students and I more ‘Real’ this year, but I am literally out here in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness talking to myself like a nut, begging You for some freaking depth here. All I want is to have a decent conversation about You with my girls. Is that too much to ask?”

(I don’t know what I was expecting as an answer to that one, but no divinely audible answer came. Neither did a mystery writing in the clouds like it seems to in the movies… And so, I returned the notecard back to my pocket and took off down the trail home.)

Still mentally fried, I barreled into the house just before four o’clock. I gathered my girls in our living room and as we all settled in with blankets and tea, I pulled the card out of my pocket yet again.

In true Kacy word-vomit fashion, I abandoned the loose agenda I had for our meeting and somehow ended up telling the story of the Velveteen Rabbit instead. “We’re all becoming Real.” I choked out at the end of the story. “I know the process and the vulnerability really hurts sometimes… Shoot. I’m exhausted and just feel like I could cry most of the time lately, but I know that God is doing things in your lives and I would really REALLY love it if you would be willing to risk sharing some of that with me. Because just like we learned in Bible last week, God really is making all things new… and that is something to celebrate…”

My word-vomit trailed off and I sat staring awkwardly around the room about to cry out of mental exhaustion. Just as I was anticipating yet another painfully silent gathering, a quiet voice came from the sofa to my right.

“Uhm. Can we pray for my family? They’re really hurting right now…”

And by-George, at four-something Monday afternoon, God answered weeks and weeks of desperate prayers for interaction with my girls. That afternoon the silence was broken in the Elisha house (along with the floodgates that held back my girls’ tears). Never in my life have I been so thankful to talk about alcoholism, suicide, brokenness, death, and Jesus. It was beautiful.

As one of my girls closed our house meeting in prayer about an hour and a half later, I stared down at that silly notecard yet again and laughed under my breath.

You become…

We’re all “becoming” in this house; God is making us all more Real, day by day. He is returning voices to the voiceless. He is beginning to set captives free in very real ways.

Even on the days when my eyes feel like they’re going to fall out like the Velveteen Rabbit’s from excessive crying, or when my not-so-old joints feel loose, and I feel shabby and under-fluffed from lack of sleep, I am learning to count my girls burdens as blessings because they are learning to trust Jesus and I with them simultaneously.

He truly is making all of us here at the Tanalian Leadership Center New and Real in Him. And just like the story goes, “Once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

“And a heard a loud Voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’ And He who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ Also He said, write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.'”

(Revelation 21:3-5)

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Obsidian

We always tease my roommate Mallory that she has the “red phone” to God.

That girl… Oh that girl has the most beautiful relationship with God that I’ve ever had the privileged of witnessing. She wakes up early every morning to be with Him. She hears His voice clearly. Her prayers seem to always be answered in hilarious ways. She has dreams filled with meaning and spiritual depth. I mean the girl might as well have those little cartoon birds and mice from Cinderella dancing and singing around her as she walks through life with Jesus by her side.

Then there’s me.

The one who constantly is tripping and bumping her way through life, trying to discern whether I’m hearing God or my own rambling internal monologue. And as far as hyper-spiritual dreams go, well… I’m the girl who once had a dream involving a car accident, a meth addict, and a cop riding an ostrich in downtown Denver… Not quite the same.

But there’s a new fixture on my hand that reminds me that while my life may not be full of dancing cartoon animals, that God is crazy-big, and beautiful, and more faithful than I could ever begin to imagine.

Before y’all go jumping to conclusions about the ring on my finger, no, I am by no means engaged to be married. (Although that has been a really fun trick to play on some of you as I’ve asked for your addresses to send out support letters…)


Instead, as I prepare to go to Alaska, I’ve decided to intentionally be engaged in a season of prayer. I’m a ridiculously kinesthetic person, and thus the ring is there to remind me to pray for God to prepare me for whatever He has gotten me into with this wild adventure. I am trying to be in prayer for faith in provision. Prayer for the church-less villages of Alaska. Prayer for those whom I am about to leave. Prayer for those whom I am going to.

Right about now I just envision you, my sweet reader, gagging at how cliche the concept of wearing a ring of prayer/non-marital engagement sounds, but just as with everything in my life, the ring has a back story and it’s tied to Alaska.

Last year when I hopped on the tiny two-seater plane to Port Alsworth, I was seeking healing. In the months leading up to the trip, God seemed insistent to make me confront the darkest parts of myself and my past… and well, I was less than pumped about it.

In classic Kacy style, I ran. I avoided Him. Or I spent all of my free time with Him asking questions that had nothing to do with my own heart. I was torn between wanting His healing and not wanting to walk through the messy process of confessing my own sin and receiving that.

The second night I was in Alaska, I shot straight up in bed. Disoriented, I sat staring at my empty hands trying to figure out whether what I had just experienced was real or not.

I twisted my body, looking around the room. The ever-present summer sun was peaking out from behind the blackout curtains and my friend Megan was still asleep in her bed to my right.

Whose voice was that? It seemed eerily real and close, and yet I’m still in Kathryn’s bed and no one else is awake yet… 

I yanked back the comforter and slid my hands around on the mattress, searching the under pillows and near my feet. Nothing. It had to have been a dream…

Just moments before, I had been standing in a room with someone I knew and yet couldn’t see. I was holding a giant chunk of glassy, black rock.

“Do you know what this is?” The familiar voice asked.

I remember holding it up in the air and twisting it to see a bit of light shine through it. From some deep, dark cavern of 6th grade science knowledge I pulled out a term and definition I didn’t know I remembered.

“It’s obsidian… A type of glassy lava rock that’s translucent rather than opaque, which just means that it lets some of the light through, but not all of it.”

“Exactly. You’re like this rock right now. You let some of My Light through, but it’s cloudy and obscured by your own darkness– the darkness that you are afraid to let Me enter. But as you learn to pray and allow Me to enter into your darkness, I will make you into even more of a vessel for my Light. I will turn this obsidian into diamond.”

For what seemed like hours, I stood holding that rock in my hands, praying through past abuse I had suffered, sobbing all the while. (Yes, apparently I’m a giant sap, even in my dreams.) The mysterious person I had given my mini science lesson to stood with His hand on my shoulder and we spoke in harmony. Over time, yet right before my eyes, the rock shifted from black to grey, then to a cloudy, shiny silver color. Just as the silver began to clear and glisten like a diamond, I sat up straight in bed, staring at my hands…

So, it had been a dream.

I crept out of the darkened bedroom, past Kathryn sleeping on the sofa, grabbed my journal and retreated to the hammock I had hung overlooking Lake Clark.

It was on that hammock that I realized that my refusal to walk fully into His Light was an act of sin.

Was it a form of sin that was obvious to the people around me? Probably not– unless they knew the depths of my heart and knew how much it was keeping me from trusting God. Did it seem to consume me? No, but only because I’m too stubborn to appear as anything except cool, calm, and collected.

But in the depths of my heart, I knew that I had grown content with my darkness, thinking that because a little bit of His Light was shining through me, that that was good enough.

As I processed and journaled that morning, I realized I wasn’t trusting God to heal my heart from the verbal and physical abuse of my past. I had simply accepted darkness and deep pain as a part of life instead of seeing it as something that needed to be brought before the King time, and time again in prayer. And that is exactly the process that began that morning.

Nearly a year later, I’m here in Denver staring at the obsidian ring on my hand as I type this, laughing to myself because not only has God done many miraculous healing works in my heart, but because a stack of support letters written about moving to Alaska are sitting in a pile next to my computer.

I have no idea what I’m getting myself into with this whole move– I will readily admit that– but God does. And I honestly have no idea why I’m being called to a village 2,500 miles away from home for the next season of my life– but I know with every fiber of my being that I am.

I have no doubt that I will see His light shine a million times brighter than a diamond in Alaska, but just like in my dream, I know that I won’t be able to make an impact on the murky darkness alone.

In my dream, I was praying with someone. I like to think that maybe it was Jesus… but who really knows. All I know is that the change in my heart didn’t begin with me, but with a prompting from the Lord and I hope and pray that He will use me and my story to begin to do the same healing and sanctifying works in my students’ hearts next year at TLC. I look forward to sharing the transformation I get to witness with all of y’all.

“I will also make You a light of the nations so that My salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
(Isaiah 49:6b)

(If you’re interested in receiving a support letter or my e-newsletters as I prepare for my journey to Alaska, shoot me an e-mail at KacyLouLeyba@gmail.com. Especially if you’ve got the “red phone” like Mallory. Just sayin’…)