Me and Eustace

I’ve struggled with my faith for decades. There have been times in which I have had a hard time believing there was a God.

Here’s a little background. For fifteen years, I was a member of a church in southern California. I loved a lot of the messaging, but the longer I was a member, and the harder I worked as I became more and more involved with the leadership of the church, the more frustrated I became. This lovely old building housed a community that had become consumed with only the well-being of the lovely old building. All of the church’s efforts were either to preserve the building or bring more people to the building. When I left that church, I left believing that a church was not a place for me to find God.

A couple years after leaving the church, my life changed dramatically. My husband received a job offer that he couldn’t turn down, and we decided together to move north. We sold the place I had bought when I was 25 and the house we had bought together when I was 33. I left the school where I had worked for over 17 years and entered into an uncertain job market. We left our strong group of friends, a collection of supportive neighbors, and all sense of stability.

We left what was comfortable and we stepped into the new. In this new life, my husband soon decided he wanted to become someone different, someone who didn’t have room in his life for me. He left. In this new life, I lived in a rental that never felt like home and didn’t have a garden—to those of you who know me, this is like missing a limb. In this new life, I didn’t find myself in the classroom, but in a library, and in an interim and therefore, to me, very tenuous position. Everything was new. Everything was hard. Nothing was comfortable.

But, surprisingly, I did have peace. In the whirl of changes that flew around me, it became easy for me to see where I needed to go. Here are three things I knew:

1) I liked myself. I liked my creativity, my sense of humor, my need to have my hands in food, dirt, or clay, my hunger to write, and my curiosity. My ex-husband hadn’t liked those things about me. I knew I needed to surround myself with people who loved those things about me.

2) Kindness was my siren. I surrounded myself with kind people—family and friends that I had known for years, yes, but I opened my heart to people I met everywhere, in classes, at work, at parties, at the pottery studio, everywhere. If I could smell kindness on you, I’d make you my friend.

3) I needed to dig in and make a home here. After my ex-husband left, my Southern California friends asked me to return. “Come back,” they said. “You’ll get a job in no time. Return to what’s comfortable.” But, I couldn’t go backwards. Right away I knew deep in my bones that San Francisco is where I needed to be and where I needed to buy a home. So, in the divorce, I asked for a percentage of what I would receive through years of spousal support in exchange for receiving it in one lump sum. I took my savings, that chunk from the divorce, and a gift from my parents, and I put a down payment on house on a sunny hill with a real back yard in which to garden and views of downtown and the Bay Bridge. I worked to make connections with my neighbors right away and have fallen in love with my corner of San Francisco.

Each of those three elements was incredibly clear to me. I liked myself. I needed kindness. I would make a home. I had no doubt.

Why was I so clear? Why did I not run back to Southern California? Why did I not crawl into the misery of self-hate and despair?

Grace.

Is that feeling of being okay when you have little on which to lean grace? Is grace not pride but confidence? Is grace God?

In the two years since my ex-husband left, I’ve come to know God in a different way than I did beforehand. I’ve received that grace, and I feel like I’ve become even more of who I am. I’m more me.

I was thinking about how to describe what my move and divorce has done for me, and I was reminded of a scene from one of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In this book, The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, the character Eustace has crawled into a dragon’s cave, found a gold bracelet, put it on, and woken up having become a dragon. Among other problems—the largest of which is the difficulty and loneliness of being a dragon—the gold bracelet is cutting into Eustace’s dragon-sized arm. One night, he goes to the lake and starts scratching at the skin around the bracelet, trying to shed some of it for relief. Aslan, a lion and the novel’s Christ figure, arrives and terrifies Eustace. Aslan tells Eustace to let him help.

Here’s how Eustace tells the story from there:

“I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away  . . .

“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off . . . . And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.” (109)

That’s such a great description. I feel what Eustace is saying. I’m swimming in the delicious nowadays.

Life isn’t easy for me now, but it is good and it is rich with peace.

This December, I’ll be marrying a man who loves the same parts of me that I love, who is the kindest man I’ve ever met, and who is making my home even more of a home with the addition of two incredible beings who will be my stepchildren.

I haven’t yet found God in a church. God is not a building, even though I find God in my home. God is not other people, though I find God in others. I am not God, though I find God in me.

God is grace. God is peace. God didn’t tear my life up—my ex-husband and I did that to ourselves. But, God tore me open so I could re-find myself.