I feel you, and it hurts

I love this quote. Because it is exactly my life. All the time.

I love how a necktie on a mannequin can inspire a color palette for a design idea. I know (and so does Mike) that I’m most likely going to break down into tears overwhelmed by the beauty/stillness/sadness/love/passion in paintings when we visit art museums. I am way too happy to walk the aisles of the linen section feeling the blankets, testing for the ultimate in softness. I accept that I can get overly happy for others I barely know because they’re excited about something wonderful happening to them. It’s weird; but it’s fun being joyful like that.

Sadly, there is a dark side to being so sensitive. Every good thing about being highly sensitive ying yangs with something not as inspiring or happy. There is an exhausting, depressing, harmful side that when unchecked can take me down a rough road. Because being this sensitive is my life, it is a constant struggle to balance the beautiful inspiration everywhere and feeling everybody’s everything. It’s exhausting because this is my life all the time.

All.

The.

Time.

So when things hit the fan, I have to be careful. Or down the yellowed with grime brick road I go. I still struggle to protect myself from “bad energy” (I hate using quotes as if it’s just a metaphor for something that’s not really true). This last week was a doozy energy-wise.

I finally had to check myself because I could feel this pull – exhaustion, feeling sick, struggling through the brain fog. I checked in with a friend, too, who understands my sensitivity all too well. We agreed that I was not protecting myself from negative elements around me.

My friend and I had lunch. He got me soup. It’s over 90 degrees right now in Florida. But that soup was life giving. It was like eating soup when you have a bad cold, shivering with fever. It fills you with warmth. I swear my friend put a dose of healing energy into that soup too. He’s cool that way; magical even. By the time we broke to go back to work I felt much better. He helped me get some clarity, release the monkeys I was trying to corral, and embrace the only monkey I have ANY control over: Me.

Then I had 5 days to myself. Five glorious, detoxifying days to myself. I feel so much better. Mentally/emotionally it was easier to maneuver in life today. I’m still grateful for being able to feel the texture of colors and see music. But I am grateful to have a friend (friends) who help me realize when I’m spiraling, when I don’t need to know something because it really doesn’t have anything to do with me, and encourage me when inspiration strikes. Because, for all the bad of sensitivity, there is the beauty. I choose to embrace the beauty as much as I possibly can.

Part 1: What Happens When You Don’t Believe Anymore?

Episcopal Church in Bluffton, SC 1854

Something is missing in my life. I haven’t been to worship in a couple of years. I miss it.

I’ve questioned a lot. Do I believe what mainstream Protestant churches teach? Or do I believe my interpretation of the New Testament and Jesus’ teachings?

What I do believe: God is HUGE. God is infinite in love, understanding, and forgiveness. God has no gender and no race. God is not human. God is. I’m only human. I’m not able to wrap my mind around the concept of God other than the feeling of love and grace I feel when I pray, worship, forgive and be forgiven, see kindness, get a hug, give a hug…

God is without limitations. This is what I believe. What happens when what I believe goes against what mainstream Protestant churches teach? Where do I go when I feel that I  am limited at church because I am a woman? Because I am a woman with no children? Because I’m not domestically inclined in any way?

One of the reasons I left church was because of its sudden turn towards limiting roles women could play in our church. Suddenly our sermons went from challenging and uplifting to all about women who have chosen poorly, fell into prostitution or drug abuse, but found Jesus and returned home to loving parents. Participation in church relegated me to two choices: taking care of children or volunteering with the elderly. This wasn’t a small church either. It was, for our town, a mega-church with many ways to get involved. These were the two choices offered to me.

When I delve into my core beliefs I do not feel guilty for believing that women and men are equals in church leadership, in household leadership, or in their communities. I’m frustrated that in 2014 (soon 2015) Christians and other religious institutions are still teaching that women are lesser than. How can my God who created both men and women in God’s own image agree with this?

Genesis 1:27 “God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”

And this is just the tip of the iceberg on the questions.

 

Oprah and Elizabeth Gilbert

I confess, I like Oprah. I think she truly wants people to understand themselves better. I think she wants the world to be a happy place. I think she’s right on track with her Super Soul Sunday series. So much wisdom from so many people from all over the world. I always feel like I’m searching for who I am, what my purpose is in this world, and all that fun stuff.

I could not pass up taking the How to Uncover the Talents Only You Can Offer The World: A little exercise to put you on the path to self-knowledge exercise on Oprah’s website. I’m taking this quiz mostly because of the very first question.

1. What did you love to do in junior high? (That’s me in 9th grade) My best friend Tina and I embodied all things Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. We might not have dressed like Bill and Ted but we certainly spoke like them. I was Bill and she was Ted. We’d address each other as Bill and Ted. “Ted, it’s bogus that you can’t come to the party on Saturday!” “Bill, surely it is.” We even performed as Bill and Ted in our English class while reading our synopsis of the previous day’s class.

2. Why do you think you really loved that activity? (Maybe reading gave you a glimpse into others’ lives, or running track freed your mind and put you in the zone.) I loved being part of Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure in Enterprise, AL because Tina understood, accepted and encouraged my goofiness. It made her laugh. It made me laugh. It made other people laugh. I was extremely happy.

3. What gives you that much joy now? I still absolutely love making people laugh. And I still absolutely love making silly voices and doing bad impressions.

4. What deeper desire do you think that activity fulfills for you? It makes me happy to see other people happy. When I’m laughing I’m not worrying about anything. Inevitably if I’ve made someone else laugh I’m laughing too.

5. If you had six months to spend any way you’d like, what would you do? I would take a class in improv.

6. What were the last three things you read, watched, or saw that fascinated you? What do they have in common? (If it’s a detective novel, a nature documentary, and an investigative report about campaign funds, maybe you love to delve deeply into a subject to examine it from every angle.) I watched too many YouTube videos of Ricky Gervais because I love his laugh. It’s infectious and he’s a comic genius. I’m listening to upbeat music that has a lot of sass (Meghan Trainor’s All About That Bass). The things I’m choosing to participate in are all upbeat and lively things. Things that makes me feel really good.

7. What are three adjectives your friends would use to describe you? Quirky, definitely. Funny, hopefully. Sincere.

8. What are three adjectives you’d use to describe yourself? Weird. Silly. Sincere.

9. Name the things that most relax you, excite you, move you, and delight you. Relax me: reading, sitting at the beach, yoga. Excite me: good movies (especially Sci-Fi), knowing that I have something fun coming up (a trip to Atlanta to see my Adult BFF Sarah so we can decorate for Halloween). Move me: reading, music, looking at art. Delight me: seeing someone’s joy coming through. laughing, swapping stories about life.

10. What do you consider your best quality? Are you showing it off as often as you could? I think my best quality is my desire to make the people around me happy. Not to placate them to my detriment. I like happy people. I like helping people be happy. Sometimes my depression gets in the way and I forget that if I’m laughing I can’t be depressed. I also hold back around people I don’t know very well because I’m afraid I’m not as neat as I think I am. I am still learning even after almost 40 years that what other people think about me is their business and not mine. I need to be me and not what other people think I need to be like.

Random Happy Memory Post

This picture is beyond creepy, but it was the only one I could get the last time I was “up home”. We lived on the third floor (where the blue light is glowing) from 1999 to 2001. I loved that apartment. I loved climbing up the creepy back staircase. I loved being able to sit in the tub and look out, well, onto my porch and the alley way. Still it was a great view and so different from what I was used to.

It had its problems. Trust me. This apartment was not updated at all. Not even to 1999 standards! The list of how not updated overshadows how great an apartment it was so I’ll just leave it alone. We lived right downtown. That was pretty cool for me. I loved being able to walk around instead of having to take the car everywhere. We lived across the street from the Genetti Hotel and Suites, Williamsport’s version of the Waldorf. Next to the Genetti is the Williamsport Cultural Arts Center where a lot of concerts and such took place. (I saw and met Pat Benetar there!) Two streets down is the Community Theater League. There is also a great park just up the street and my church was literally behind my building.

I LOVED living downtown. I LOVED living in an old building. I LOVED living in the building that quite possibly housed an office my grandfather worked in decades ago (we were never sure and some family said yes he worked there and others just weren’t sure).

I LOVED waking up at 3 a.m. because the street lights were bouncing their orange glow off newly fallen snow. To me this was a particularly joyful thing. At 3 a.m. no one had driven on the snow or walked on it and it looked like a magical winter wonderland. By the time I left for work it looked…lived in. I never begrudged the mornings I was woken up that early just to catch the fresh snow before it was muddied by us humans.

I don’t think I realized it then because I had a lot of worries on my mind then but I felt so chic living downtown and walking places. I hope to have that experience again.

 

Reflections on Freshman Year

This is a hard one for me to talk about but sometimes revisiting a hard past helps in present healing.

In junior and senior high school I would have an anxiety attack every time I would travel away from my hometown. These attacks got worse if I wasn’t around my one of my closest friends and my parents. A ski trip to North Carolina almost got ruined by my anxieties except for having two good friends who helped me refocus on the skiing, one of my favorite things to do. A dance competition to New Orleans the following year was pure torture as I had no friends on the trip and no “trusted” adults.

So imagine me going off to college by myself fall of 1993. The happy picture of me above was taken at Troy State University winter quarter of 1994. I started fall semester at Montevallo University in North Central Alabama. A teeny tiny liberal arts college about 30 minutes outside of Birmingham, AL and about 4 hours away from home.

No friends. No one I was close to. Just me and some of my stuff. No car, just a phone and some stamps (yeah, this is pre-internet/pre-email). I found myself knocking on the door of our residence assistant’s dorm room one too many evenings. I was having panic attacks and not knowing what they heck they were. Really horrible panic attacks. I could barely leave my dorm room much less do much of anything else like getting involved with campus activities. I actually had a panic attack for a new friend because she and her sorority sisters were going to the beach – a three hour drive from school – as part of a welcome to the new sorority sisters.

My parents came to see me a few times and I would beg them to let me come home. I was truly afraid of living at Montevallo. I just knew something horrible was going to happen to me and I was going to die in that backwoods teeny town that was so small it didn’t even have a Wal-Mart. What small Alabama town doesn’t have a Wal-Mart? And if it didn’t have a Wal-Mart it sure as heck didn’t have a hospital, much less a doctor that might understand what in the world was going on with me. The college nurse would give me cough syrup and allergy medicine. It didn’t matter what I would say but panic attacks were just not something that anyone thought of.

The part about mental illness that makes things worse for the person who is sick is the part where we feel ashamed for causing everybody so much trouble. Every time I had a panic attack I relied on other people to help me feel better. I didn’t have a single tool to help myself – I hadn’t been taught them yet – and my sanity depended on other people. The constant crying, the panic attacks, the dependency wears not just on the person with the illness but on the people around her as well. There is a lot of shame associated with having a mental illness especially if it’s undiagnosed and untreated.

I ended up leaving after finals. I transferred to another school closer to home. Being able to be close to the people I trusted helped me feel safe. I was able to enjoy being a college student, to enjoy life away from home. I learned independence. I had my safety – my family were close by in case of emergencies, but I had also gotten well enough to create a new family with the theater students.

This is an unpopular opinion. Not everyone needs to or is ready to go to college upon graduation. Our society forces it – go to college or you won’t get a good job. Go to college or you’re not socially accepted. Much like trade high schools, trade schools, schools close to home, places where the 18, 19-year-old student can feel comfortable stepping out into the world for the first time should be just as accepted as the kids who run off to school half way around the country.

There are so many students I’ve met who are just not ready to be in school but yet they have been told they HAVE to be in school. Have to be. Who says? Is there a law? Sometimes students or college aged people need to just work for awhile, figure out who they are before going to college.

If your student is struggling and is asking to come home just listen to them. Listen to their worries and help them find a place where they can find the strength to get up and get out on their own. Don’t force it on them. And don’t tell them, “This is what you said you wanted.” Don’t make them anymore ashamed than they already are or feel. Find a professional therapist to help too. They can teach everyone – the student and the parents – the tools they need to grow.

 

A Good Challenge

My co-workers have issued me a good challenge. I’m addicted to soda, specifically Diet Pepsi. I love Diet Pepsi. I sometimes feel as if I cannot start my day without it. Much like coffee people needing their morning Starbucks, I need my morning Diet Pepsi. My lunch Diet Pepsi. My afternoon Diet Pepsi. You see where I’m going with this addiction. One of our students gave me a separate recycling box for under my desk specifically for cans and bottles. Yeah, just a little embarrassing (more than my grammar).

THE CHALLENGE

In effort to cut my diet soda intake down my co-worker AG suggested I bring in 5 cans of diet soda and label them Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

THE GOAL

I’m trying to drink more water. This summer I was at a work event and I got really dehydrated because I hadn’t had enough water. If you’ve ever been dehydrated you know how horrible it feels – light-headed, dizzy, nauseous.

THE FINE LINE

I can drink the next day’s soda but that just means that I’m down a soda. So if I drink all my sodas by Wednesday then Thursday and Friday I am out sodas while at work.

HOW I’M DOING

Well, it is a good challenge and it doesn’t make me feel deprived. I did really well Monday-Thursday. Today…not so much. But that’s okay. I’ll just try again. I can make a different decision next time.

Being Rude for My Sanity

‘Tis true. Please do not tell me to calm down if I am having a panic attack. I’ll probably hit you or cry. Probably both. You’ve been warned.

I know what I need to do to get me through a panic attack. And that might just mean that I have to walk away from you, not attend your party, go into a dark room and come out when I’m ready.

In other words, sometimes my illness makes me seem rude. But if I don’t follow what I know to get me through my panic attack (and to lesser extent, an anxiety attack) the hurt will rain down on me.

No one likes a friend/co-worker dry-heaving in the car/office.

I’ve been fortunate enough (I guess…some days it doesn’t feel very fortunate) that my co-workers feel comfortable coming to me and chatting about their lives. A co-worker mentioned recently that I should have “therapist” added to my job description. Sometimes a secretary is a lot of like a bartender-type therapist. You come to us because you think we know where everything is (usually we do *wink*) and then that leads to some belief that we will also listen to your life stories.

But being so approachable has drawbacks. The big one for me: If you have a stomach ache and feel sick to your stomach and tell me about it I’m probably going to lose my shit. I have Emetophobia: “a fear of vomiting. Most people don’t know that this fear is common enough to have its own name. Yet vomit phobia can be a disabling condition which severely limits the lives of those who struggle with it.”

Yeah, disabling doesn’t even cover the panic attacks I used to have. A large and belly-full belch could incite gagging in me. Seeing someone chew their food with their mouths open would create a panic attack. Emetephobia is a real thing. “Some are afraid that they will vomit. Others are afraid of seeing others vomit. Most have trouble describing what they fear will happen if they vomit, or see others vomit, but vaguely fear some terrible loss of control, a catastrophe from which they won’t recover. They fear insanity, death, endless vomiting, and so on. Most times they can recognize that these catastrophes aren’t really going to result from vomiting. But when they feel that vomiting may occur, then they don’t feel so sure.”

So, please, please don’t take offense if I ask you to stop talking to me about your stomach ache and upset tummy. I don’t want to be rude but at the same time I don’t want to have a panic attack. A co-worker today was quite ill. I don’t know what happened, thank God, but after seeing my co-worker leaving the office looking horrible I started to get those feelings of panic. I was taught how to rationalize what is obviously an irrational fear, but I needed sometime by myself to do it. Which I couldn’t get. So I had a conversation with another co-worker, who luckily did all the talking while I talked to myself in my head, and was able to calm down. I did my best not to run in fear (which I’ve done) when I saw my other co-worker. Later I was able to offer a ginger ale. I keep a stash of them in my desk drawer if I should feel queasy for any reason.

Maybe some day I won’t immediately freak out, even if just in my head, when someone isn’t feeling well.

 

“Overcome Emetophobia: Fear of Vomiting.” Overcome Emetophobia: Fear of Vomiting. Anxiety Coach, 5 Aug. 2014. Web. 4 Sept. 2014.

Gender Inequality at Universities

I’m 39. I can’t pull all nighters like I did when I was 20.

In my office we talk a lot about equality and inequality and feminism. This morning at 3:15 when I notified my professor that my part of the project was complete ( a nearly six-hour straight design and implementation) I realized that he had hoped that I would just take it and not complain.

We’re on day 3 of week 6 in our 10 week Spring Quarter. One of the two classes I’m taking this quarter requires us to do everything in teams. The theory behind it is so that we get some real world experience working with others. What SCAD has once again failed to realize is that most of their e-learners are working professionals who have experience working with teams – we do it every single day.

In the beginning I told my professor that this quarter I had several after work programs that would need me to work from 8 a.m. in the morning to around 9 p.m. at night. I gave him the date and the name of each event so he would know. I told him that I did not want to be a Team Leader because of my crazy schedule. We even had a long instant messaging chat about it where I explained again that I work full-time, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and could not do homework during my working hours; and gave him my special dates list again.

A day later I found out that I was the Team Leader for my team of three. Are you kidding me? This should have sent a red flag because I looked at other teams, teams of 5 members, one team made up of nothing but working professionals like me who I asked to work with because I knew we’d have similar schedules and realized that my team was not at all what my professor and I discussed the night before.

By week 3, my teammate J (another woman, a young woman with a chronic illness) and I had enough of our other teammate, Big Ego Boy (BEB). She and I pow wowed and decided that we would invoke the ability to fire one of our teammates. The curriculum for this course is threaded with “you better do well or your team will fire you!” rhetoric. I told the professor about our issues with BEB; and being the nice sweet woman I said he was a good designer and could our professor help him so we could continue working together. Professor said he’d reach out to BEB and let me know.

The following week BEB still hadn’t completed his tasks causing J and I to go into stress overload. J encouraged me to truly fire BEB. So I went to our professor again. I laid out all the instances of BEB’s problems and why we didn’t want to work with him. Our professor took 12 hours to respond. He wanted me to see if we couldn’t work it out with BEB. I said no. He suggested that we finish the project together and then he’d let BEB work on the next project by himself. I said no, we wanted him gone now.

Then the professor came back with, well, didn’t BEB do the logo design by himself and didn’t BEB do the moodboard by himself? WHOOSH up went that red flag. I told him that if each team member had contributed individual moodboards, that we each submitted sketches and drafts of the logo and as a team we decided that BEB’s logo best defined our team philosophy and work aesthetic; but in no way did BEB do all these things on his own.

This resulted in more hemming and hawing from our professor and hopefully we could all work together.

This morning at 3:30 a.m. when I was finishing part of the project that BEB dropped the ball on (and to be honest, I am not faultless here) I told our professor that I would not work with BEB again at all. That BEB had disrupted my life too much and that I should not be expected to put up with that childish attitude.

That’s when it dawned on me: Our professor doesn’t want to deal with BEB, another guy. But we as women should be the better people and just suck it up and make peace and learn to deal with it.

All the conversations I’ve had at work (which I’m missing today as I’ve had less than 2 hours of sleep since 6 a.m. Tuesday morning and 6 a.m. this morning) about feminism, inequality, double standards for women was something that I had dealt with ALL QUARTER LONG! Had BEB gone to our professor and said Wendi wasn’t doing her job, you know that our professor would have come to me and said the team has decided to fire you. But BEB is a guy. He’s kind of “expected” to be rough around the edges and it’s okay that he has an overblown sense of ego. He said as much to me during one of our conversations.

I look back at some other exchanges I’ve had with male professors; this isn’t the first time I’ve been patted on the head and told to run along. Another professor that I repeatedly asked for help told me several times if I would just read the assignment I would get it. On my last exchange with him I told him that I had read the assignment several times and that apparently something wasn’t clicking and that he should want to work with me and teach me instead of telling me to run along and reread the assignment. Then I emailed the department chairman and a couple of other people. All that did was get me a time slot to call the professor and be completely ignored the rest of the quarter.

So not only do I have to deal with the professors at SCAD not understanding the non-traditional student who does all our work online, but now I get to deal with gender inequality too! FABulous! Just what I wanted. So progressive SCAD, good job.

Sick Kitty and a Missed Funeral

breaking my heart

Last night I dilly dallied about as if I were trying to put as much time between me and leaving for Enterprise to attend Rodney’s funeral. As if that would heal my heart. Ignore it, and the pain goes away. Poof!

So I was just drifting off when at 1:30 a.m. my beautiful, bossy Fluffy Jane started retching in the living room. I don’t know if it’s a Kitty Mama Sixth Sense or what, but every time one of my fur-kids gets sick I know it. So I popped out of bed, grabbed a flashlight and found her leaning over a small pool of bile and blood.

We knew she hadn’t been feeling well. About a month ago we bought the wrong cat food. Ridiculous that we can barely remember what cat food to buy; and even more ridiculous is that we don’t even write down the name. So no excuses. Jane is a very picky cat. She turned her nose up to the food and wouldn’t partake. She would get a bit hungry, have a bite or two, but for the most part, her bowl remained full until Jack or Lizzie finished it off for her. A couple of weeks ago we realized that she was loosing weight. She’s a big cat; part Maine Coon, part God-Knows-What-All. She used to be a hefty 16lbs. We figured it was the food. We were about to run out and when we brought the new stuff home she’d eat and get back to herself.

Until this morning.

You can only lie to yourself, to each other, for so long before you have to face the music. I cleaned up the vomit, washed my hands and climbed back into bed where we discussed what we would do the next morning – Cat to the Vet or Hop in the Car Bound for Enterprise. We decided that I could sleep in the car on the drive up; therefore allowing me to take Jane to the vet in the morning.

At 7:30 we opened the doors to the clinic. At 8:15 the vet took a look at her (the tech, Mary, had already been in to take some blood, temperature, etc.) and get caught up.

By 8:30 we all determined that Jane was very, very sick indeed. By 9 some of her blood panels came back and confirmed the depth of her crisis.

Isn’t that a strange thing? My cat is in crisis. Her health is in crisis. By 9:30 all panels were back and the news was not good. Jane has pancreatitis, among other things stemming from the pancreatitis. The goal was to hydrate her, get her on a tiny morphine drip to take care of the pain she was in, and see if in a couple of hours she would eat a bit of wet food and water.

At 10 a.m. the vet comes back in and says he was pretty certain she just might also have Addison’s Disease. It’s extremely rare in cats. It’s more often seen in dogs and humans. So they were going to do another test before the antibiotics and to see if that was the case.

At 10:30 I rolled out the door, reassured that I would be called with updates on her condition.

At 10:45 I parked in Holy Faith Catholic Church parking lot and meditated, prayed, lit a candle, prayed some more, meditated some more. Because not everyone understands that my cats and my dog are my children. That I would have gone to Rodney’s funeral if Jane wasn’t sick or needed to be hospitalized. That saying good-bye to Rodney with his sister and his friends was something I truly wanted to do. But…

It just wasn’t going to happen. Not today. My cat, my baby girl, my Fluffy Jane is sick. She is hospitalized. She’s connected to IVs and being force-fed and drugged up; and if tomorrow her panels are not improving we have to say good-bye to not prolong her pain. Or ours. I believe that is something that Rodney would have understood. He was cool that way.

One of my prayers today was asking God to show me how I could honor Rodney. My ears, my heart, my mind is open. Friendship was so very important to Rodney. Dedication, loyalty, unconditional love. I don’t know if I can excel at these things like he did but I’ll take it a minute at a time if I have to if it is meant to be. Maybe just finishing my degree – something else Rodney would have liked to have done – will do it. Overcoming my insecurities about my talent. Losing weight and getting healthy. Just going for a good walk every morning. Who knows? But I want to try. For him, for our friendship, and the grace of forgiveness.

Chance Meetings Heal Hearts

I tend to randomly meet people. Seriously, just chance meetings of people who I really dig. For instance, meeting people at retreats for work who work in my division but not in my office (and my division is HUGE) and it feels like I’ve known them forever (Stephanie L. I’m looking at you).

Last year, (last year? year and a half?) I started reading a blog called Tamara Out Loud. I started reading her blog about being a Christian woman because then, as I am still struggling to do, was trying to figure out what my beliefs were, what my faith was because I was really, really lost. Her blog was so real. Turned out she lives in my town and invited me to her church Bible study. I went a few times and enjoyed it a lot but let my own insecurities (I’m not good enough, I don’t have kids, I can’t cook, etc etc) get in the way and I stopped going. I felt like I was intruding on this great group. I’m sure I wasn’t but that’s what insecurity does – it lies. So to further hide my embarrassment I stopped reading her blog, too. Yeah, my insecurity knows no bounds!

I recently popped in to see what was up. She announced the book she edited was published. The book’s idea genesis began from a blog post at A Deeper Story called “What’s a Girl Worth?” (you can read more about the book’s creations and beginnings here as she celebrates its introduction into the world; it also has links to where you can buy a copy). (Interesting side note: today’s top blog post is “The Five Stages of (Faith) Loss“; gonna have to read that.)

Every day in April she is posting a free graphic with a quote from each contributor of the book. The quotes are beautiful. The image is beautiful. But the quotes hit deep and hard.

After all that’s been happening the last few days I knew I could use a pick me up. When I saw the graphics and quotes I knew I wanted to share them, but also share Tamara’s blog and A Deeper Story’s blog. You don’t have to agree with everything they say but they will definitely make you think. I’m all for thinking. I am also all for grace.