Diary of an Underachieving Churchgirl

I wonder at the power of this love that pulses my heart and pushes through my veins. I lay next to my 7 year old son as he falls into the first moments of sleep. It is 9:20 p.m. We spent the last hour lying in his bed listening to an audiobook together. He is lying on his back. I notice his profile. Immediately I remember the first time I saw his profile. It was in a sonogram picture. I showed it to my Dad, my belly bulging with my son’s growing life, and we both shed tears. That face. My son’s face. It was a miracle then and it is a miracle now, here in this dark bedroom, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and my son breathing next to me… Here is that face now. That very same profile. In the innocent first moments of sleep. I wonder what he will dream about tonight. I wonder what he worries about, if he has worries. I wonder if God will be in his dreams. Or if he knows how much he is loved. I think about the life he has lived since he came wailing out of my body....

At a girls’ lunch, my friend shared that she and her husband will be taking our church’s citizenship classes, a series of five two-hour classes that are offered after church on Sundays. At the culmination of these classes they will stand on stage and the church will clap and welcome them as new citizens.   My husband and I have been attending our church for seven years, and have not yet completed these classes, or attended one, or signed up to attend one… well, you get the picture. When it comes to doing church, there is a fine balance between overachieving and underachieving. Sometimes, church life can feel like a vast, raging, roaring river. You stand on the bank and carefully bend to put your toe in the swiftly moving water—maybe I’ll do just this one thing—and WHOOSH you are sucked in by the strong current, flailing madly as you are rushed along, almost drowning sometimes, just doing everything in your power to keep your head above the water. You must volunte...

I read a book review of Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic (HarperOne, 2013) in World magazine, in which the reviewer, Marvin Olasky, wrote the following: “Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic shows a British writer’s recognition that belief in Christ makes the greatest emotional sense not for the ‘young, buff, and available’ but for the aging woman with a demented husband, or the boy in the wheelchair with ‘spasming corkscrew limbs,’ or the drug-addicted woman with a ‘rat’s nest of dreadlocks’ who will soon be losing her child.” Desperation. We cry out to God when we are at the end of our rope. When we are utterly alone. When we’ve got nowhere else to go. My first encounter with Christ happened when I was a child. Honestly, I don’t think I had a grasp of the degree of my own depravity as a law-breaker at that time, but I was desperately thirsty for God and longed for my relationship to my Maker to be affirmed and sealed. I ran to Jesus with open arms, as children are apt to do....

I get really angry about my life sometimes. Do you, too? It feels like days over and over where from the moment my feet hit the floor in the morning to the moment they finally curl up for the night in their woolly socks, I am at the service of others. Even in those dark hours between sleeping and waking, I am on call, because I am a mom. And sometimes the kiddo needs me in the middle of the night, and worries about my husband dying in his sleep keep me awake at odd hours, and frightening dreams keep me restless. There’s no time when I am off-duty: from my son, from my husband, and from my own wretched thoughts. It’s easy to blame my family when I get weary of the day-in-and-day-out endless loop of life. I long for my family to need me less. I long for the kiddo to get himself dressed and take a bath without calling my name every two minutes. I wish I could go just one day without always being at the ready for when that voice calls me. I am always at the ready. Even when th...

I do not mean to suggest to any soul that I am a great writer, worthy of a following. This place is for community. It is for people of faith to seek and find God in the support of one another. It is meant to be a conversation. I have my own daily issues with not ever measuring up, with perpetual underachieving in the arena of living out my Christianity, and I share my daily struggle and joy with any person who longs for community, as I do. I just want to be part of the conversation.   It’s tempting to endeavor to compete in the blogging world, to strive to measure up there, too. I follow a few excellent writers. Sometimes I envy them their success. But as I work out in my own mind what I really want this to be, it’s not about proving myself worthy to be in the same league as the greats. It’s about you. I write with you in mind. My hope is that when you are discouraged, when the Sunday morning high has dissipated and the Monday morning blues set in, you know you...