But how do you order the cotton candy?

My quasi-cousin Kore and I met up at an impossibly chic taqueria on Sunday and I’m still puzzled how the Minivan Mafia let me get away with this one, how I didn’t get fined (yet?) for wearing Not Nearly Enough Black, and how it appeared I was the only one whose skull was completely blown to bits over this cotton candy novelty served apres dinner.

This cotton candy? Arrived in a big bountiful arrangement. The same big bouquet shape you’re used to seeing at the fair. Only it was placed on tables around us like a fetching centerpiece. Now, I’m not so daft and irrelevant that I’m unaware that cotton candy for growns is a HUGE thing in foodie places like Vegas, etc. I mean I might own some mom jeans but I know my way around a Sephora counter and I know that contouring is a thing I need and a boy brow is a thing I shouldn’t attempt at home. I am current in most of the ways that matter. But the cotton candy was a surprise at this urbane eatery what with its neo-gothic stained glass windows and wrought-iron sectionings.

Here’s the rub. We couldn’t figure out how to order it. It wasn’t on the menu. Maybe there was a secret password or you had to know a guy, a cottony confectionary kind of guy to order. Kore and I aren’t delicate lilacs afraid to assert ourselves or ask difficult questions like FLOOFER SUGAR, WE CAN HAZ SOME? But! Hark! Just as we asked for the check, a bloom of blue cotton candy was placed in our midst. Unbidden but definitely not unwanted. We pulled at wads and tasted an unexpected fruity flavor. This was not your sad clown cotton candy in a bag that you begged your dad to get you at the Ice Capades mostly because everyone else had some. Kore was the first to make the discovery: this cotton candy was sprinkled in Pop Rocks. For the love of Screech and Lisa Turtle, what a pair. Delicious and frivolous. Suddenly our table with a couple of cackling hens was transformed into the table that was having the most fun party for two, and I totally hope it made everyone who didn’t yet know the cotton candy secret insanely jealous.

I’ve thought about that cotton candy in the days since and I realize it’s less about the spectacle of it, and more about the moment that it arrived. You guys, I swear I heard windchimes when they set it down in front of us. Kore and I had been fine to wrap up our meal without ever solving the mystery of the cotton candy, perhaps investigating further on another cotton candy research junket (as one does). But then the restaurant said, Oh. No. Don’t leave yet. You haven’t tried this blue treat of ours. Your stay here isn’t complete until we set a bouquet of sugary goodness before you.

Even though the Pop Rocks as sprinkles was a new concept for me, I have sat at this table before. The one where I’ve been given the enviable thing without having to ask for it. The one where I’m sitting with someone who accepts me and yet challenges me to pass on the baloney when it comes around. The table where I didn’t make the reservation, where I probably didn’t even abide by the dress code of the place, but was treated kindly. And given the dessert chaser.

I keep returning to the moment, because it was all so fresh for me: the reward no one deserves but which the restauranteur wants its patrons to have; the feasting eyes from other tables; the wondering, the menu scoping. I am going to be spending some more time in this moment where we realize we are getting something we very much wanted and didn’t know how to ask for, and being glad and present for when someone who just wants to delight in our delight says, Oh, why. Here you go.

I think this is the magic we don’t have nearly enough of in our world, and for which we should strive to create more for the people we love and others we may not even know. Because these are the moments where our expectations are suspended and our childish hopes met. Show me the folks who are mad about that. Then sprinkle them with a generous portion of Pop Rocks and see what happens.

From the messy middle of the mid-winter muddling through

The temptation in writing about hard things is to wait until they have passed, until we are on the other side, our feet firmly on the shore as we peer back out at the choppy waters and sigh, so glad we’re not still treading water and trying like the dickens to avoid a shark attack.

Where we get it twisted is not in the writing of it, but in the presenting of it. As far back as high school, I remember our brilliant creative writing teacher Mrs. Sheridan (swoon, we all loved her so) explaining that it’s fine to write through the pain, but if we want to present it as the truest thing, as the thing about which we are most confident, we need some distance.

It’s not that writing about it while we’re in the messy middle of it is wrong. It’s not that we’re unreliable narrators. It’s just that our vision is limited. We’re myopic. We’re nose pressed to the glass of the hard thing on display. We’re smelling the fresh flowers at the funeral parlor. But what a thing we’ll have to write about in a year when they’re dried and shriveled. We’ll smell the fresh in our sense memory but we’ll also have a story to tell about the bouquet that looked like it had been caramelized in a cast iron skillet.

I’ve been trying to write through my winter depression this year, rather than wait for it to pass. It’s a seasonal depression, and one I treat with light therapy and a low dose of anti-depressant, along with talk therapy and a high dose of aerobic exercise and binge reading of sadpants memoirs and inhaling Hershey’s kisses by the bagful. I wish I could say that writing through the heaviness has been leavening. But I still feel as though I wake up most days with an elephant squatting on my chest. I still feel like making a salad is possibly tantamount to climbing K2. I still want want to be hugged and for nothing to be expected of me from anyone. I am still depressed and trying to fight through it. Writing does not help to change this or cure this, but it does change my awareness of how I am coping.

Just yesterday, for example, I realized that it’s not that I become a different person, per se, that I’m inhabited by a depressed monster of a different color. I’m not unrecognizable. I’m still there. It’s that it takes so much effort to pretend that the depression isn’t also there. I still think my kids are funny and their Big Chungus memes are still ridiculous. Sometimes my face just winces instead of the easy laughter flowing out. So I wish sometimes to just go join a different body. One that doesn’t have the elephant sitting on it.

I think about the line in the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” where they resign, “We’ll have to muddle through somehow…” and I’ve always genuinely wondered what the somehow actually looks like, and how they’d carry on until the fates allow for a reunion. Those aren’t the songs that get written, though. It is the blog post that gets written by ya girl and right now I’m muddling through. I’m grateful for a husband who truly understands, two Voxer chatgroups that make me feel heard, two beautiful kids that see my penchant for sweatpants and forgetfulness and love me anyway, and Bill Cunningham’s Fashion Climbing on loan from the library.

Holla from the messy middle.

Review: Love Where You Live by Shauna Pilgreen

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When the Revel Reads program offered this book among its options, I leapt at the chance to read it, largely because I liked the subtitle of the book. “How to Live Sent in the Place You Call Home.” I thought it sounded very charming and it appealed to me as a woman who believes we are all sent with a purpose to different places, whether it be a little visit to a nursing home or a long-term stay in a state where we’ve never lived before. We as a family have entered a season of putting down roots and I was interested in what this book could offer someone like me.

When I received the book and began reading the Introduction, I found the author’s perspective to be refreshing and circumspect. I had become acquainted somewhat with the urban missionary movement in the contemporary American Christian church and some of it really bristled me. Some of it sounds incredibly naive, and other examples have sounded downright entitled. Some call it “new monasticism” and others refer to it as upside-down kingdom living. I wanted to know where this book fit on the spectrum of stories/guides to being missional in one’s own community.

After reading the Introduction, the two chief questions I had in reading the rest of the book were:
Question #1: The author is white but does she recognize her privilege in moving into a community?
Question #2:- As a transplant to a community where she and her husband are trying to church plant, do they work with organizations already on the ground to learn more about their community?

I was sorry the answer to Question #1 was…not really? I am frustrated when I read about one more white woman in the church who doesn’t realize the amazing backpack of privilege she carries. The author talks about the three places she and her family moved to in and around San Francisco. It appears she blithely moved into each home without having concern as to whether or not she would be well-received. In fact, the author speaks about not receiving anything—no welcome or acknowledgment. This actually both struck me as naive and privilege-blind. I’ve lived in the city for 10+ years and I never expect to be acknowledged. It’s part of survival in a densely populated area. You just cannot expend your energy to each and every person passing into your lane. She does not mention worrying about any looks askance or overwhelmingly suspicious surveillance of her family moving in — something plenty of people of color have to worry about each day of their lives as they move through the world. The author talks about adopting their daughter from India during their early years in San Francisco. I’m sure becoming a multi-ethnic family overnight came with its lovely points and challenges, and I would have wanted to hear more about that. Instead, here is a passage from the book that bemused me:

”In my city, I’ve got a lifetime of people to love. The immigrants. The refugees. The under-resourced. The minorities…and I joyfully say, ‘You are welcome here.’”

I could barely read the rest of the book after this passage. It sounded at turns Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and also incredibly pompous. Really? As a transplant to a city, you still feel entitled to tell others that they’re welcome in a city? There’s nothing wrong with being a welcoming person, but maybe those folks already know they belong. Maybe they don’t need a white woman to validate their being there. Being blind to one’s own privilege is a huge turn-off and I just never found the level of awareness I had hoped to find in this book.

The answer to Question #2 was maybe. As church planters, it appeared that this family and the other planting staff did reach out to others in the trenches who were doing their best to start churches. But I didn’t see much in the way of allying with organizations already on the ground who could provide resources and an invaluable intel into the community. The author prescribes whittling away the shoe leather in walking the blocks that surround her home and meeting the people and praying for the places in which her ministerial circle comprises. I think this is great, but it’s also one of the criticisms of new monasticism: that oftentimes these idealistic ministers seem to get burned out by doing it all from scratch, when they could have sought existing, embedded resources to help them find their path.

There were many redeeming parts about the book, including the early chapters on doubt and discomfort. I loved this: “A fear of missing out is not from God.” The author and her husband offer excellent, tactical strategies for planning a purpose-driven move. The book is also filled with a tremendous diversity of perspectives from luminaries such as C. S. Lewis, Marc Batterson, Maria Goff, and Pete Scazzero whose words enriched the pages.

Overall, there were far too many surefooted explanations for how ministry should be done in a place outside of one’s own comfort zone. The blindness to privilege was a major detractor for me as a reader. However, I think this book would still be a helpful companion for those who are discerning a move for ministry because of the cards the author is willing to show in sharing her spiritual walk through discomfort and toward the unknown.

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review.