Tag Archives: Women’s issues

Hope in Letting Go by Amy Vogt

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Posted by kritzau on March 1, 2012 – 8:32 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Finding Hope

Amy, her husband Danny and their soon to be three kids live in snowy Colorado. Most days she is a wife, mom, neighbor and friend who values genuine relationships, pursuing the extraordinary in the ordinary, and most carbohydrates. Amy desires to make life memorable, and loves to capture moments from behind a lens, namely her 50mm. She shares more of her family’s story on her blog.

 

 

I am proud to claim my oldest child title. Of course I am, right? My love affair with being bossy started at a young age and peaked in marriage…I mean motherhood… Okay, I’m working on the bossy thing. I am motivated, action oriented, relational, type A, mostly responsible, and many of the other things that you probably associate with oldest children. If I’m honest, I am also, at times, too goal oriented, controlling, self-absorbed, and particularly self-dependent.

Perhaps a more interesting fact is that I am also married to an oldest child, and for 2 years we only had one child, a boy, who by default was also an oldest. As you might imagine, the battles of will in our home are fierce! Thankfully, our baby girl arrived soon enough to add a little grace and balance to our mix. God, protect her!

I am blessed with two beautiful children and one on the way. I have experienced success in the workplace. My husband walks with God, has an amazing job, the highest level of integrity, and a passionate devotion to our family. I am not going to lie and say that we have not spent many hours over the years working to shape our vision for where we want to be, creating a path of how we think we can get there, and then working our tails off to make sure that we did. We are driven by nature – go-getters from birth.

Oh, Lord, give me faith to trust you more.

I am challenged daily to fully grasp how to function as my driven, make-it-happen self while serving a God who desperately wants to direct my destiny toward His standard of success and perfection.  I am pulled by a world that woos me to create my own future in a country and era where success and happiness seem dangerously within my reach.

While my opportunities to pursue joy and satisfaction on my own terms are seemingly endless and astoundingly tempting, it is my experience that my greatest hope and ultimately my greatest contentment comes in my release of control and usually from the greatest depths.

Someday, Lord, may I be strong enough to relinquish control on my own. For now, thank you for taking it from me at just the right times.

Not even three months ago, our driven spirits were quieted as we watched the projection of our precious, unborn baby girl dancing around on a screen during an ultrasound. Her amazing life was on display giving us joy and confirming a fear. Our baby girl will be born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate. And amidst our joy, tears streamed down our faces, and my belly shook as I cried a violent, silent cry. We clearly saw, for the first time, the deep grooves in her lip and palate. And, while there was so much to be grateful for, even in that moment, we eventually let ourselves succumb to the despair.

We had lost control.

Over the next few weeks we mourned the loss of a low-risk pregnancy, the addition of the many surgeries that lay ahead for our baby, all of the doctor appointments we would be scheduling, and the medical decisions we would make, the challenges our family will face as we welcome our precious daughter and sister into our lives.

The grief I have felt for my child is so much deeper than grief I have ever felt for myself. But, more importantly, I can now say that my hope for this baby is exponentially larger than my grief. Hope has a way of growing from dark places, and I have to release control to gain a grasp of it. Hope grows, and then comes the joy, contentment, and peace. I don’t believe I could have planned it this way.

Father, I praise you for you are all-knowing.

In a cathartic twist of fate I am reminded that my ways of planning, striving, and directing my life seemingly limit my ability to have the deepest, most true hope – a hope that is rooted in faith and trust in God instead of myself. I can only get myself so far. And, thank God, because I’m pretty sure that the places I want to be headed, the places I want my baby girl, children, and family to be headed, are places that are much better than what I can meagerly conjure up on my own.

I am driven, but my God is mighty.

Baby girl is due in April, and it feels so close and so far away. I know that things will be challenging, and I am sure that our planning, driven, controlling natures will be ever emergent. But, in my heart is a prayer of surrender; my spirit is filled with hope and peace.

 

Hope: an art journal by Jamie Kugelberg

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Posted by kritzau on February 22, 2012 – 10:58 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Finding Hope
Hello to all of the other Beautiful Messes out there! My name is Jamie Kugelberg and I have been reading “A Beautiful Mess” for a few years now. It has helped to bring me on my knees before God as He is walking with me through my journey of perfectionism and a lot of other fun stuff. I got married 4 months ago, and my most recent accomplishments have been learning how to use a slow cooker and exterminating cockroaches!

I love to journal, and this piece is from my most recent art journal. To me, it is a beautiful representation of what it means to find hope because of the process I used to create it. I used a technique called masking where you paint a white glue like substance on your paper in whatever shape or form you would like. I chose to write the word “hope.” Then you watercolor over it. After everything dries, you pull the glue-like paint off to reveal your original design.

 

Often our lives don’t point us to hope. There is a lot of mess around us, and hope is hard to find. However, I always find hope when I can see a little corner to peel back some of the mess. Maybe it is a song that I love, an encouraging chat with a friend, or the smile I see when my loving husband walks through the door at the end of the day. Whatever it is, I take that corner of beauty in all the mess and peel it away to reveal the hope that was hiding before. It doesn’t mean that my mess goes away… its just that changing my perspective, even if only for a moment, helps me to find the hope in the midst of the mess.

Hope-full Advice by Naomi Mehl

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Posted by kritzau on February 14, 2012 – 7:47 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Finding Hope

Naomi Mehl is one of those people who carries herself with grace.  She is a graceful friend and a graceful teacher to her high school Spanish students.  She is also one of those people who doesn’t talk to talk, so when she talks, we listen.  Thank you for your words Naomi.  And truly Happy St. Valentines.

 

For the majority of the 25 years I have been living, I have been single.  This has led me to be both the voluntary and involuntary recipient of all kinds of relationship advice. From parents, relatives, friends, the media, the 15 year-old high school students I teach; they probably all have rained their relational wisdom down upon me at some point.  I am sure, given where we currently fall on the calendar and the looming presence of that-holiday-that-shall-not-be-named, you too have been hearing all kinds of thoughts on relationships, regardless of your status.

My personal least-favorite has always been something to the effect of “Don’t worry.  It will happen when you least expect it,” followed by some long tangential story about how a friend they knew was perpetually fed up with being single, had some sort of epiphany, and magically decided to be a confident independent woman, only to be swept off her feet by an amazing partner the next day.  And as a nice finish, they will end with saying “So you just need to be confident and not anticipate it.”  The reason why this is my least favorite advice, though I don’t totally disagree with the observation, is because it addresses one of the core things I’m not good at: releasing control of something I want.  I understand that waiting and watching (at times despairingly, frantically, cynically) for a significant other is like waiting and watching for water to come to a boil.  It generally only makes the process seem to run less and less on my timeline.  But I did it anyways, because I couldn’t let go of control.  I couldn’t really believe that finding hope didn’t necessarily mean finding a great relationship but could mean finding contentment and belief in what I already had.

I had to ditch this common belief that hope is what you do while trying to get something (or someone) you want.  All throughout high school I passively waited for some boy to notice me.  I hoped, I waited, I fixated, I wondered, and I didn’t get anywhere.  I also didn’t end up being very confident or content either.  For all the effort I was putting into hoping for a relationship, I wasn’t very hopeful.  I certainly didn’t see how much hope could be found in the person I already was.

Finding hope has never been a one time thing.  If I am going to acknowledge that finding hope is a choice and action, it is definitely one I end up having to chose every day.  Every day I chose whether or not I will be open, whether or not I will be present with myself and with others around me, and whether or not I will be attentive to both the pleasant and the painful in my life.

Choosing this more and more often has also led me to realize that finding hope is a process that doesn’t entirely rely on me or on the perfection of my actions.  There have been plenty of days when I was closed up and closed off, yet hope still entered in.  There were plenty of days when I made the wrong move, got hurt or hurt someone else, yet forgiveness came.  There were plenty of days when anxiety about a relationship consumed me, but it still turned out okay.

Again, as we find ourselves in the season of high romantic expectations and unsolicited advice, may we chose to be open and present.  May we find hope in that present place.  May hope enter in.

 

The end in sight by Heather Castle

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Posted by kritzau on February 8, 2012 – 10:11 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Finding Hope

Heather Castle is a development professional, an adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University, and an ENFP on Myers Briggs Personality Test. She was born in August and is left handed  She is a bad joke teller but is working on it. Coming soon: she will write for a living one day. 


I recently experienced a melt down.

 

I mean, a MELT DOWN.


It was the kind of emotional break where the harder you cried, the better you felt. I woke up severely puffy-eyed the next morning (and to be honest you can’t really look bad the day after you disintegrate into emotional oblivion, because you’ve already met your worst self – snot and tears and trembling lips. You can only look awesome from there really).

I cried to my mom on the phone, I cried to my dad on the phone, I cried to my husband in person, I cried to my therapist in person, I cried to God in the shower and I cried to myself in a robe after my shower. And the reason? I was scared. I was scared to start a new adventure where I would be pushed to give parts of myself I didn’t think I had. I was crumbling under the weight of “what will be?” and had zeroed in on an apocalyptic, doom-and-gloom attitude. All I could do was cry about it.

 

I had accepted the position to teach an upper division collegiate course and I was PANICKING. There was no way out, I had to show up to class and teach and I had to suffer through my own worst nightmare of cottonmouth and Power Points. I was experiencing chest pains before I had even started.

I have convinced myself over the years that there is a standard or bar of “success” that has been calculatedly placed precisely one inch above my head. I will never reach it. In this most recent episode, I was expecting to gracefully catapult myself above this metaphorical standard, only to trip before I even left the ground.  As I prepped for this class, I would succumb to momentary flash forward images of crashing and burning in front of twenty young adults who were being groomed (seriously, groomed as we speak) to become incredible critics of public speakers and mediocre teachers (I suppose I should know this, as I was one of these devil students).

 

If you talk to my mom, and my dad, and my brother, and my husband even, they would all tell you that this is completely normal behavior on my part.

In fact my dad tried to reassure me through my sobs that he had been slightly worried that I wasn’t acting my usual worried self before the start of this class. That is because I have established something of a cultural norm in my family; a bad pattern of behavior where I publically experience severe turmoil before I start something new.

Usually if I choose to do something new wherein the outcomes have not yet been established (actual outcomes, not predicted ones), I find that this equation holds the potential to expose everyone (who is everyone??) to the fact I am a big fat faker and that I really belong back in high school where I need to learn to grow up.

 

Good grief, how’s that for insecurity?

But (and there is always a “but”) here’s a profound discovery I realized about myself: when I look to the beginning of something new I am blinded to the fact that there is an end in sight. I forget that.

The grandeur of the beginning, of “new”, the expectations and standards and setting the bar really high and of course the attempt to reach for the stars, it all clouds my mind.

I get blinded at the start.

I can’t actually see the other side.

When I am faced with the choice between two roads, I usually find myself at the beginning of a hill. I generally reach the top of this hill when I have made a choice and I endure in order to see this decision through to its end. Once I’ve made it to the top of the hill, I am able to see the other side of the mound; I have the “end in sight” and I can make out what the next phase of my journey might start to look like. Hope then is the anticipation at arriving on the other side of that hill with all my limbs intact.

At some point, and this is the truth,  we will no longer need to remember that there is an end in sight; we won’t need to remind ourselves that this too shall pass, that we will overcome. This is because, I think, the life we hope for is the day when Jesus will come back. This is the point of Advent: to remember that we have a hope that one day, we will no longer need hope – when there will be no more crying, no more death, no more suffering, no more waiting until “this” is over.

 

Hope is that expectation, that anxious waiting for what will come to pass. And if we are Christians concerned with the kingdom of God, which is here and which has come and which is God with us, Immanuel, than we are in the business of the completion and the fullness of God’s glory now. We might even say we work to “end hope”, that is to say, to no longer need hope. To me this is a fully present reality and a future endeavor.

And this is also somewhat problematic for a girl who gets sidelined by the beginning of things. Because if I can’t see the end in sight, if I can’t remember that there is an ending and a completion, I lose hope and faith and love. I lose it all and even turn on my own self.

I forgot that there is an end in sight – that hope is in the completion and the fulfillment of all the expectations set before me in my syllabus. Right now the end feels a thousand years away, but I am here to remind you that baby girl this too shall pass!

We are in the process of working ourselves into the completion of the fullness of Gods kingdom on earth and I believe this with my whole heart because here’s the real truth: God lives in my body and I trust that and forget that all the time.

 

 

 

Opposite of Shame by Shannon Leith

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Posted by kritzau on February 1, 2012 – 8:38 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Finding Hope

 

shannon leith is an artist.  her life is consumed with finding clarity and contentment in the ordinary. she writes in all lower case. her website shines with creativity.  you can find her with her camera, with her pet bird, or with friends and family because even though she finds hope in the ordinary, she is extraordinary. 

 

 

 

hope has felt hopeless lately.

with men— it seems like i will never find a fit for me. am i going to be alone forever?
with money— i honestly don’t know how i’m paying this month’s bills.
with my art— i often feel like a 4 year old: what i create just feels like a cute and pathetic try.
with my business— the dreams i’m pursuing feel like they’re failing.
with my home— i wish i had someone here to do the daily with.
with my pet bird—why does he always bite me? WHAT THE HECK.

as i sit with these disappointments its become pretty clear to me that i deal with shame.  the voices inside tell me that i don’t deserve a good guy in my life, that i am incompetent with money, that my art is awful, my business sense is off, i will be alone forever, and that i can’t even take care of a bird.

turns out: these things aren’t true.
but they seem true.

i met with a woman last week who told me that the way to heal my shame was to claim hope.

i essentially feel hopeless and worthless right now in almost every area of my life. it seems absolutely impossible to have hope that i will one day find a man who is inspiring and vibrant and deep.  it seems impossible to hope that one day i will have my finances under control.  it seems impossible to think that my dreams are worth pursuing.

so, as a way of practicing my theme of no-shame 2012, and as a way of claiming hope—— i’ve been photographing myself after my favorite time of the day: my shower.  i love the feeling of being all drippy and fresh and awake and alive. i love the warm towel after. i love the steamy bathroom.  i love deciding what to wear.  i love putting on moisturizer.  i love the look of a clean and bare face.  i love wet wavy strands of hair.  i don’t miss a day. showers make me feel grounded and centered and lovely.

 
these images are a declaration that i don’t have to downplay myself.  i can put a little bit of hope in the possibility of something being bright and full today instead of disappointing and empty. it’s a new day.

 
(no shame 2012.)

 


Noticing Hope by Ivy Zequeira-Russell

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Posted by kritzau on January 25, 2012 – 11:30 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Finding Hope

Ivy Zequeira-Russell is a woman I admire and respect.  She is true to herself, her voice, her values, family and community. She is a dear friend and teacher to many, including her boys who she home schools.  These days she is also preparing to welcome Baby #3 who will be surrounded with lots of love and much hope.

I’m looking for things all the time.  “Mom, where’s my Lego magazine, my shoe, my baby, that little piece of paper I wrote on?”  Really I could go on.  So I look.  Often times, its right where we left it.  With a little searching much is found and peace is restored.  However, a few months ago things got really messy.  I wasn’t as available to find many things…not toys, keys, cell phones, clarity, joy, or hope.  You know, all the necessary things in life.

It started when I was 10 weeks pregnant with our third baby.  We have a 7 year old boy, a 3 year old boy, 2 cats, 3 chickens, we homeschool, I volunteer as a La Leche League Leader, and then my husband, Ben, broke his foot playing soccer.

Initially that broken foot helped me realize what a helpful, kind, and fully engaged partner I had in Ben.  His way of showing our family his love is primarily by being physically engaged, playing hide and seek, going on walks, running errands, helping with dishes, doing yard work, etc.  All of a sudden this loving person didn’t have his language available.  He felt so mute to me.  I missed sharing the life and rhythm we had created.

But then after 8 weeks, his foot didn’t seem to be healing.  That was 8 weeks of me doing all the cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, potty runs, driving, taking the trash out, and getting up to attend to our 3 year old every time he needed a parent and I was pregnant.  Thoughts of my 20 year old single mom of three kids flashed through my mind.  I hated it.  I had so little space to grieve, empathize, and integrate these new meanings of my childhood.  I began to say things to my children that again reminded me of my life as a child.  I argued with Ben about how right I was to give the kids a piece of my mind.  I felt so justified.  The tears came from all of us.  I tried to talk to Ben about his healing when I felt I couldn’t handle it any longer and it always ended in an argument.  I felt he needed to do more, consult with another doctor, keep searching for help, just something!!

I cried the kind of cries that come from your gut and leave you wanting to vomit.  I was so stressed about stressing my little fetus.  I couldn’t believe that I was pregnant and in this mess.  I had planned, charted, and seduced to get pregnant!  I was so in control of it all.  How could this amazing pregnancy have become so overshadowed by the craziness?

So fuck looking for shoes, Legos, books, toys, or even food.  Find it yourself!  Then I’d cry, take a nap, and eat.  And luckily some semblance of the good enough mom reappeared.  The family survived.  They found food, played, visited friends, sang lots of Christmas carols, and little by little I joined in.  I gave up trying to understand what was happening to Ben’s foot, I simplified, kept simplifying, changed my expectations, and then I simplified some more, but after 4 months I wondered would his foot ever heal?  Would our relationship be restored after all the frustration and exhaustion?

Hope came in the form of wise women who looked at me straight in the eyes and said, “Its time for you to get help with the kids, housekeeping, cooking, and yard work.  Its time for you to pay attention to how much you’re giving to others and not taking care of your self.  Its time.”  I listened.  I especially had to listen to the baby inside of me.  And then I was able to take in the resilience of my boys.  My 7 year old was kind, creative, and began to tap into a very responsible part of himself.  My 3 year old was saved by the Christmas season and its wonder.  He sang loudly as he memorized his favorite Christmas carols, wrapped lots of presents of little things he made for baby and me, and he was always eager to do whatever I had energy to do.

Hope came all around me.  Not hope in Ben’s foot healing but hope in the moment. For right now, we’re okay.  It was a deep knowing that just as the bread and juice sustains and reminds me of all that’s come before and that I’ve endured, we will make it through the next few hours.

I’m slowly making sense of it.  Its in my mind, body, and soul.  This time hope found me because I sure didn’t have energy to look or care about it. It seemed to gently spring up and I began to notice its presence.