Thirty, Flirty, and Falling: How Making an Audio Drama Saved My Life

My 30th year on earth was shaped by two forces. The first: A bad thing I did, a mistake I made that hurt people, myself included, and from which I’m still reeling. The second: A good thing I did, a story I lived and breathed and refashioned into an audio drama.

I have never fucked up as badly nor created anything as beautiful as I did this year.

One threatened to drown me, spiraling in the pain and mess of it all; the other kept lifting my head above the water and making me laugh and giving me something to love, something to fight for.

What is saving your life right now? It’s a question Barbara Brown Taylor asks in her book An Altar in the World. I’ve seen other bloggers answer this question, have answered it myself, but never before have I been so sure about what is killing me and what is saving me.

This year, what saved me was telling my story by telling someone else’s story, someone else who grew up evangelical, someone else who got depressed and drank too much, someone else who got hurt by people who claimed to speak for God and stopped seeing God altogether and felt so very, very alone.

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A Monastic Retreat, in Moments

The website for the Retreat House at St. Benedict’s Monastery isn't perfect. Everything I need to know is there, but it is not the most beautiful design or the most efficient layout.

But I don’t need it to be beautiful or efficient.

Sometimes, the real thing is so full of glory that no matter who is telling you about it, or how, the glory will seep through. This is that sort of thing, where nothing earnest can be misrepresented, where even the blurriest picture will cause us all to gather around.

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Dear Adventures in Odyssey: I Love You, But It’s Complicated

“Did you know that Lizzie used to work for Focus on the Family?” he said, she said, with a gleam in their eyes.

It’s not a secret, my internship from last decade, but it doesn’t come up often. When it does, though, it’s a conversation starter, a newsworthy item for my friends to pass along. I don’t fit their picture of someone who once worked there, you see.

Even at the time, I didn’t really think of myself as working for Focus on the Family (FOTF). I was there for Adventures in Odyssey; nothing else at the organization held much appeal.

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Night Driving: A Story of Faith in the Dark {a review & giveaway}

How do you know God is real?

Because you’ve felt him.

Until you don’t anymore.

Addie Zierman’s second book, Night Driving: A Story of Faith in the Dark, officially came into the world one week ago Tuesday. It arrived on my doorstep that night, and as I absorbed myself into it, I found myself within its pages. Like her first book, When We Were On Fire, it took me to familiar places, hard places, true places.

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When You Miss the Darkness

Is it strange that I miss the darkness that sucker-punched my soul?

This was four years ago. I was living overseas, six months split between two continents, saturated in Christian community that was young and fiery and expectant. I was young and fearful and depressed, but this was my chance. This could be my cure.

One day, we left our drafty English manor with its roast dinners and familiar faces and small groups for the Midlands, for Coventry, for Evangelism Week.

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The Unraveling

I am unraveling.

The illusion is broken: I can’t always trust myself. Sinking deep into the beats and even the palpitations of my own heart was always my saving grace, my peace and my candle and my anchor.

Maybe it’s just that I haven’t had enough time to sift and plunge into the clamoring silence with my bare hands. Maybe I didn’t go deep enough, maybe my eyes weren’t clear enough, maybe I wanted it too little, or too much. Or maybe not. Maybe it was always going to implode, no matter what I did or didn't do.

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Listen to the Longing

Travel is lovely; travel is lonely.

I know loneliness very well … both the loneliness of a crowded room and the loneliness of my own room. I know the loneliness of being the only one and the every one.

I know longing too.

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To Be a Part of the Mystery

In a few days, I will be offering to others something that is not mine. I won't be able to take credit for a single taste, for the mystery that's among us, for any trembling hands or averted eyes, and I don't want to. The body of Christ, broken for you, my friend, for you, my neighbor, for you who are hungry. The blood of Christ, shed for you.

I tell people I've found a church in Denver, but most of them don't understand how big of a deal this is for me. They don't know the backstory of doubts and church-weariness and all the sharp points that started poking out of my skin two or three years ago. This church I've found now, rich in liturgy, gentle in spirit, a meeting of the old and the new, is a gift in my rocky faith story.

I've inhaled that same sweet air in the written word too, in those men and women who write blogs and books that remind me that I am not alone in the questions I ask, in the injustices I see, in what I'm frustrated and passionate about.

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I might be a feminist

Part of me doesn’t want to write this, not yet. Part of me wants to wait until I have everything decided and sorted out and settled upon, until I am ready to perfectly articulate and defend it all. Then it would be less scary.

I'm not ready, but I have decided to come forward anyway.

Reading what women like Sarah Bessey, Rachel Held Evans, and many others here and there and in between have written is changing me.

Love is becoming more important. Grace is becoming more important. Justice is becoming more important. I am open to your stories and your viewpoints; I am ready to wrestle out in the open and be challenged.

And I might be a feminist.

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