Connect, Don't Compete

Measuring. I saw it at work when I taught middle school, when my husband was a student pastor, in exercise classes, in my own life: Friends suspiciously eyeing one another’s clothes, suspiciously listening to one another’s stories, suspiciously analyzing one another’s social media accounts. We hang out with one another, but our brains are calculating figures our mouths are not, and while we spew compliments and feign laughter, our brains are busy measuring, measuring, measuring. How good am I compared to her? Do I belong here? Is she better than me?

“Connect, don’t compete.” It’s my friendship mantra. I can’t quite remember where I picked it up, but it’s proven to be a convenient thing to carry in my back pocket. 

I have the greatest friends in the world. Friends who encourage me, friends who leave soup in my mailbox when I’m sick, friends who hold up my arms when life is too much, friends who send me updates on Amelia Earhart’s whereabouts (WHERE IS SHE), friends who surprise me on my birthday wearing cardboard cutouts of my face. On more than one occasion I have been close to tears when reflecting on those God unexpectedly and perfectly plunked into my life when I was battling loneliness, feeling misunderstood, unliked, and overwhelmed. For me, friendship is one arena in which God has proven his faithfulness over and over again.

I’m an extrovert through and through, and I get sad and very very weird when I’m left alone for too long, falling hard into Wikipedia until I’m crying over a random historical figure (looking at you, George Washington Carver), painting something that does not need to be painted, Instagramming seven times in a row, walking around the house sobbing about the mess without actually ever cleaning anything. God made me a certain kind of way, and he knows I’m better when I have people around me. And though that’s true for me practically, it’s true for all of us spiritually: We are better together.

But “better” is the danger word, the one that alarms the Enemy. Because the together things are better things, they are vulnerable to attack. As much as I love my friends and as much as I root for them, my heart is ugly, and often it bristles when someone is wiser, more talented, better dressed, thriftier, thinner, prettier, in a healthier marriage, is a better parent, whatever. My heart gets out its wonky measuring tape and turns my insecurities into a challenge: I must be as good as her. No—I must be better. “Better” gets distorted, changing from a “we” thing to a “me” thing. 

For a girl who used to spend softball games doodling her name in the dirt, competition is an unfamiliar phenomenon. Often I don’t even recognize it for what it is, but it’s certainly there, and in friendship its about as helpful as a dirt-doodler on your softball team. In fact, it’s toxic. Over the past few years, God has been calling me out, showing me when my spirit of competition blocks the holy connection between friends. He's teaching me that measuring tape is a noose that chokes the life out of a friendship, leaving only empty shells exchanging niceties. 

God have mercy on us, friends who have clung to measuring tape rather than each other!

The heart of competition is pride: I’m better. But the heart of connection is this: We are better together.

And yet there’s still something better than “better together.” The heart of the Christian is supposed to be sacrificial in addition to being relational: “You can be better, and we can still be together.” We must not only let our friends shine, but shine bright, and shine ever brighter supported by our encouragement. Because light is good and brings glory to God, and we root for it wherever it can be found, faithfully battling the internal screeching voice that begs us to compete.

And then the heart of the Christian takes it a step further than “better together,” further still than “you can be better” to the ultimate: “God is always, always better. Let’s pursue Him together.”

These are the friendships that change us from the inside out, eventually extending beyond the friendship itself to change our families, our churches, and our communities. These friendships pack a punch, and they are worth the battle.

And so when we want to compete, we choose to connect instead. We give less advice and more love. We make our living rooms safe places for hard conversations, for tears, for unwashed hair. We fill the air between us with life-giving words: “You are working so hard to be patient with your kids. You are teaching me so much.” We “outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10),  looking for ways to put one another first, looking for ways to Jesus-love one another.

We “take captive every thought to obey Christ,” (2 Corinthians 10:5), training ourselves to recognize our brain's measuring tape as a threat, refusing to create distance with competition. When our “better” gets out of whack, we must jolt it back into place, reminding ourselves over and over: Connect, don’t compete. Connect, don’t compete. Connect, don’t compete. We are better together.

Christine

When my husband and I first started dating, I was sixteen, and I loved ballet, singing, and church basketball, not because I could every be described as “sporty,” but because my dad was the coach, and my team was made up of all my friends. I wasn’t a terrible basketball player per se, but I had trouble accessing my competitive side, and I’d do things like hug my friend on the opposing team when she scored, close my eyes when I was shooting, and forget every play instantly even though there were only three plays, the same three Dad taught us every year since we were ten.  SORRY, DAD. I earned a microscopic amount of fame for saving balls from going out of bounds by performing what ballerinas call a “penché" and what basketball players call “confusing.” When I played basketball, my ballet-borne balance was my friend, the primary trait that saved me from being completely terrible, except for when it didn’t. RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NEW BOYFRIEND.

My cute new boyfriend came to my basketball game, and the team was abuzz. Dad wasn’t. Dad doesn’t really ever get “abuzz” anyway, and like any good coach, he wanted us to focus. But focus is hard for a troupe of sixteen-year-old girls, especially in the presence of New Boyfriend. Something was in the air that day—perhaps love, perhaps excitement, perhaps an army of invisible feet because your homegirl Carol COULD NOT STOP FALLING DOWN. The game went like this: Dribble dribble, fall. Get up and walk for two feet, fall. Pretty soon my body became permanently fused to the waxed wood floor, and the entire team was losing its collective mind, weakened by hysterical laughter and shared horror. Finally Dad couldn’t take it anymore, and he yelled, “Caroline! Get on the bench!” and then I army crawled to the bench and didn’t get to play anymore. New Boyfriend shook his head the way I’ve now seen him do daily for fourteen years, every time I do something ridiculous. I looked down at my feet. What was wrong with them? “HELLO, FEET, don’t you see New Boyfriend over there? Don’t you know you were supposed to have your act together today? He’s going to think we’re weird!!” But as you may have guessed by now, I welcome embarrassment as long as it gives me a good story later, and this one I can tell pretty successfully in person, especially if I have the floor space to fully perform.

While recently talking to the artist formerly known as New Boyfriend (now known as Husband), I realized that the Falling Forever Phenomenon is a constant in my life. In some areas, I completely have my act together, planning ahead, anticipating road bumps, behaving cool as that cucumber we always reference when talking about coolness. In other areas, I’ll stumble in the first few minutes, and then, balance forever off-kilter, keep falling and falling on and on into eternity, never able to recover until I eventually die or Dad makes me army crawl out of there. Like when you ski expertly for the first three days of a mountain vacation, and the the last day, you fall getting off the first lift and spend the remainder of the day toppling down every slope, and if someone even utters the word “snow,” suddenly, there you are again, on the ground, a tangle of skis and goose down. 

This is what Mother’s Day Out has been for me. Last year, I enrolled my daughter in a preschool program one day a week so that I could have a slightly better shot at adjusting to having two children. The orientation meeting happened the week I had my son, and her first day of school happened when he was two weeks old. If you’ve ever seen the mother of a two-week-old baby, she is likely a hot mess, and understandably so. I was met with lots of grace. However, those understandable beginning “stumbles” lead to a full year of free fall, and now I am forever in full hot mess mode.

“What form?” “What party?” These are phrases I utter with stunning regularity. Certainly there was a calendar sent home to prevent continual surprise, but I must have allowed my child to eat it or something because I have no idea where it is.

The perpetual confusion for preschool structure might be slightly normal for the mom-brained, but friends have deemed it “abnormal” that I let Adelaide’s teachers call me Christine the entire year. CHRISTINE. At first, I was too sleep-deprived to catch that they were talking to me, and then once I realized it, it felt too late to make the correction. Every Wednesday on the way to school, I practiced this sentence: “My name is not Christine, it’s Caroline.” This is not actually a difficult sentence to say, but my people-pleasing runs so deep that I never said anything and had my name changed to Christine, so just letting y’all know.

One problem with me, Christine, is lunch. I’m the worst at packing lunch. For a while, I didn’t pack Adelaide enough lunch, so she stole other people’s food like a little beggar child. “You can pack her more food if you want.” “What? Okay I will. So sorry, we graze all day and I have no idea what she eats in one setting.” Enter shame spiral called “Christine is raising grazing thieving cows.” I also packed moldy cheese on accident. Twice. I chastised myself: CHRISTINE, please check cheese prior to packing!

And obviously I, Christine, was never going to remember to update Adelaide’s “extra outfit” after a weather change and growth spurt. One winter day I came to pick her up, and I spotted the craziest looking kid I’ve ever seen, clad in teeny tiny bike shorts, belly hanging out of too-short shirt, hair going every which way, a little “I give up” look on her face. She’d been barfed on, no doubt the result of some crazy Christine juju that I’d inadvertently put in her morning milk, and then her dignity was challenged further because her mom had packed the weirdest outfit imaginable. “Sorry, girl, I really Christine-d that one,” I say to her. She said nothing because she was one.

A friend reminded me recently of Shauna Niequist’s wisdom in her book Bittersweet, to go beyond the to-do list and make a “Things I Don’t Do” list. To give ourselves permission to not be good at everything and furthermore, permission to be okay with not being good at everything. So here it is, as plain as I can preach it to myself: It’s okay to be bad at things, and it's really okay to be okay with being bad at things. I am a fan of this.

We all know that expecting perfection from ourselves is exhausting and unrealistic, but maybe we’re forgetting that it’s also a kind of idolatry—thinking we can be like God. But I think our ridiculousness can be redeemed: My imperfections can remind me of The Perfect One. My falling-falling-falling can remind me of the One who is always steady. My forgetfulness can remind me of the One who is always fully present, fully aware of every detail.

So, this is me, putting “Be Preschool Mom Valedictorian” on that Things I Don’t Do list. Look, I think I could win an Olympic medal for speed-crafting a haphazard kid costume, but I simply cannot, under any circumstances, not lose my tuition check inexplicably from the car to the building. And inevitably this year, as I go through Adelaide’s bag each week, finally taking out all the stuff from last week, I will encounter a perfectly wrapped bag of Goldfish or crayons with some sort of precious school pun, and I will shake my fist in the air and shouting, “EMMA, WHY! WHY ARE YOU SO NICE, CONTINUOUSLY GIVING EVERYONE ADORABLE PERSONALIZED TREATS AND MAKING ME LOOK LIKE A NEANDERTHAL BECAUSE YOU WILL NEVER EVER GET ONE IN RETURN!” But it’s okay, because I am no Emma’s Mom. I am Adelaide and Greer’s mom, and they call me Christine.

We Will Hold Up Your Arms

My friend was hurting. And what could I say? “I love you, and I am so sorry.” 

Of course she was broken-hearted, defeated. Of course she was mad at God. Certainly we know in our minds that he’s good, that often his goodness is beyond our understanding, but a crushed heart can choke that knowledge right out of a person. Because we also know that he’s unspeakably powerful, that nothing escapes his attention, that nothing happens without his permission. And that knowledge has some implications that we wrestle with, implications that start to overshadow what we know about his goodness: He could have shielded us, and he didn’t; he could have stopped the pain, but he didn’t. 

Who could blame her for being mad? So I told her, “We will ask, we will scream—why? Why?! And we will beg God to give your pain purpose, to make it count for something.”

Somewhere along the line, we bought into the idea that faith was an adorable thing, a precious thing, something to write in swoopy letters and frame above the mantle. But there’s nothing adorable about it. Faith isn't pink and floral, it’s a fight, and it’s a gory one at that.

Seeing her wounded heart broke mine. Seeing how she was hurting hurt me, too. The stench of blood surrounded us, and she said words that smelled like surrender: “If God loved me, he wouldn’t allow this.” 

And so I decided to do what people do for battle-weary friends.

A story of battle and weariness: In Exodus, Joshua led the Israelites in battle as Moses looked on from the top of a hill with God’s staff in his grasp. As long as Moses raised his arms, the Israelites would gain ground, but if his arms began to drop, they would lose. 

What a weight to carry. Of course Moses was weary. Because who can carry the weight of battle alone?

“When Moses’ hands grew tired…Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset. So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword.” Exodus 17:12-13

They came alongside Moses and they held up his arms when he was too weak. Together they carried the weight of battle until at last they were victorious. 

And so I told her, “We will hold up your arms.

Though the day is long, we will hold up your arms.

Though the ache runs deep, we will hold up your arms.

Though weariness threatens to win, though you may breathe words of retreat, until the sun sets and you can finally rest victorious, we will hold up your arms.”

This is what we do for our friends, when they are weary and their arms start to shake. We hold up their arms and steady them to victory, all the while knowing someday it’ll be our arms that shake, that faith crises do not discriminate, that none of us can be strong all the time.

As the inevitable battles wage, we will borrow one another’s strength. We will whisper to one another reminders of truth:

We will remind one another of David: “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle” Psalm 56:8. Remind me of pain that was great but of a God who was greater! A God who does not turn away from our tears but redeems them.

We will remind one another of Job: “Though you slay me, yet I will praise you” Job 13:15. I will remind you of his story of overwhelming tragedy, of darkest fear become reality, but a story that at its core is a love story, a declaration of faithfulness: “I will love you no matter what.” A God who is truly worthy of love and worship and awe, no matter what. No matter what.

But most of all we must remind one another of Jesus: A man acquainted with sorrow, who knows what its like to hurt. A man who could have spared himself from pain, but instead willingly endured it for our sake, for our redemption. Pain allowed by God not because he is evil but because he is good. Mysteriously good. Profoundly good, and yet he has promised more: “And I 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’” Revelation 21:3-4.

One day it won’t hurt anymore. But today, while the battle still wages, the Lord will be our banner, and we will hold you, my dear friend. We will hold up your arms.

For Sarah and Caroline

On Turning 30 and Driving a Minivan

I am turning 30, and I drive a minivan, and this does not depress me whatsoever. I could write sonnets about my minivan, and I think I love it more than my husband, who can only open one door at a time for me. The van can open two doors and pop the trunk with the click of a button. Plus the van actually shielded me from my newest and deepest fear, deranged attacking ostriches with red eyes at the nearby safari park, and my husband didn’t do ANYTHING except sit there and laugh. So that’s it, he’s the worst, and the van is the best.

As for 30, it gets a bad rep, and I feel sorry for it. I can hear high school me talking about a girl who was dating someone older (like 22, gasp), and we were all, “EW, he’s like THIRTY,” saying the word with the same disgust one usually only reserves for words like “wart cream” and “Caillou.”

But the truth is that 30 is good, and the 30-year-old-minivan-driver life is a good life. It’s a life in which cracker crumbs will eternally fuse themselves into the carpet, which adds character, and it’s a life that screams, “Yes I DO ignore my eyebrows completely, and I can’t scrounge up an ounce of insecurity about it.” Thirty makes the worrying-about-what-people-think clouds part and the sun shine, and I realize I’ve been battling my inner loser my whole life, and finally I was like, “Come here, you adorable loser, I just love you.”

So now I bear-hug loser Caroline all day every day, and we are having so much fun together. It was lame of me to try to hide her away for three decades because she brings a lot to the table, particularly an affection for yard gnomes and a very fiery monologue she’s prepared in case she is ever asked her opinion of polygamist Kody Brown’s hair. (Spoiler: The deep hatred prevents her from sleeping well.)

Obviously Caroline’s most beneficial skill she has come to completely embrace is her (my) hand-like feet. It’s my most enviable mothering quality by a long shot. Feeding baby while shrieking toddler needs to get in the bathroom? Open door with toes. Paci on the ground and grumpy giant baby making quad-burning squat feel less-than-desirable? Pick up paci with toes. And don’t worry, I WASH IT after that because I’m not a monster, unless I don’t have time and a tiny person is screaming at me, in which case, LOOK AWAY.

But don’t worry, my thirty-year-old life is not all glamour! A month ago our then 11-month-old son ate a dead spider. He just crunched it up with his little gums and swallowed and there wasn’t a thing my hands or hand-feet could do. “At least it was dead,” people say, but this is little consolation. Because HE ATE A SPIDER. “Good protein,” other people say, and this is also little consolation because again, HE ATE A SPIDER. And also, it's not like his protein needs are so extreme that we must resort to spiders. He’s a baby, not a Crossfit-er, although I will say that his fat rolls are formed into perfect little biceps, which is why he wears a lot of tank tops when he eats spiders.

So if you see me cruising around town in a slick ostrich-proof black van, ignoring my eyebrows, bumpin’ my favorite audio book, tossing Goldfish into the backseat to Spider Eater and his sister Dog Feed Eater, and driving with my hand-feet (just kidding, I don’t do that), don’t pity me for my stereotypical suburbanite ways. Just say, “Hey girl, how do you feel about polygamist Kody Brown’s hair?” And I will tell you: THE DEEP HATRED HAS REVEALED TO ME THE PROFOUND DEPRAVITY OF MY OWN SOUL!!!!!!!!

In conclusion, thirty is awesome. Peace and blessings.