at 31

I asked Sam the other day who the “child” was who was rolling hose at the fire station. Apparently that child was 23 and has already gone through medic school—older than I was when Sam got hired. Did I look that young, once?

I spend a fair amount of my time with people older than myself, but none of them has mentioned the weirdness of being a business owner in a networking group run by fellow 1990s-born peers, of taking your kids to a pediatrician younger than yourself, of realizing your husband is now the senior person on his shift when just the other day you were the newlyweds and newly-hireds meeting the veteran lieutenant for the first time.

And then Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Thirty-one years old.

Parent of two.

This is life now in the middle place, not young, not yet old: watching faces fade out of family photographs one by one, watching your baby morph into a toddler and then into a kid, every day feeling like you’re meeting someone new and losing someone old. Childish romanticization of young death gives way to a desperate prayer that God will have mercy on your family for another day, that the inevitable shattering loss will stay its hand for just one more hour of the present tranquility.

Time pulls like a riptide, and perhaps the lesson is that the harder you resist, the more likely you drown. Breathe. Don’t try to swim to shore. The waves will always win.

He was 31. So am I.

He was a parent of two. So am I.

He was mortal, fragile, always just one breath away from God taking His breath back. So am I.

At 31, a Levite man might have been a priest for a year. At 31, Jesus was one-third of the way through His ministry and two years away from death. At 31, my husband had already been bereaved of his mother; at 31, my mom became pregnant with me; at 31, my cousin Megan had just one year left to live.

In this state we live and endure, somewhere between certain death and eternal life, between paralyzed fear and a frenzied sprint, not young anymore but not quite old. Like wildflowers doggedly fighting for survival, we stay productive and pretty and try to forget that it’s all because we know winter is coming and we are going to die.

We don’t know when. But we can sense the angle of the sun is changing.

as a beautiful olive tree in the field

I type this while intermittently staring at “Our Lady of the Olives,” which rests against the wall just above my computer screen. It’s a print of a painting by Nicolò Barabino: A white-and-deep-blue clad Mary holding an infant Jesus on her lap, framed by olive branches and a floral-wreath border. The top of the painting says Quasi Oliva Speciosa in Campis.

As a beautiful olive tree in the field.

Serendipitously, Trader Joe’s was selling little potted olive trees today. I bought one. Today is the anniversary of the day my girls and I went to the little white Anglican church for the first time.

One year of being weekly washed in the water of the Word.

One year of dwelling in the body of Christ, and inviting Him to dwell in me, at the sacramental table.

One year running free, unencumbered by the burden of needing to know and be right about everything.

It’s been a year of asking questions (so many questions), learning, and consistently being humbled by the rigidity of my paradigm or the incompleteness of my understanding. A year of noticing how many things I have gotten exactly backward, and never thought twice about before. A year of discovering—as if for the first time—who God is.

Thus, Our Lady of the Olives graces my desk. A reminder that God humbled Himself to come to us fully human: the kind knit together cell by cell in a mother’s womb, the kind birthed through blood and travail, the kind that becomes an inconsolable newborn or a tantruming toddler or a strong-willed child. A reminder that the Father crucially partnered with Mary—and many women before her, all the way back to Eve—to enact redemption, and that for a time, she was His very tabernacle dwelling. Somehow a holy God did not think Himself too good for us, even though we so often think ourselves too good for Him.

A reminder, too, that the Creation project began with a temple garden, lush with life and color and goodness, like the flowers that frame the figures in the painting. That the Creator delights with me in my garden’s blossoms, my children’s antics, my home’s sanctuary. He tabernacles here with us.

I went looking for Him in so many places—across the country, overseas, at a certain type of church, inside a certain version of the Bible, in my own ideas and projects and “glorious purpose”—and though He never abandoned me in any of those things, I found Him here.

Little old here.

Common and nondescript, but simultaneously significant. Like a beautiful olive tree in the field.

Like a little white church on the corner.

peace, be still

As I have discovered the value of the written and well-loved prayer, one of my favorites has become a prayer “for quiet hearts,” found in the Book of Common Prayer:

O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Often when I sit down to write here, my heart is not remotely quiet. There’s a lot of tension, disquiet, a sense of striving—for the right idea, the right words, the right way to explain myself. There have been times I’ve asked God if it’s time to be done, if after 15 years of writing on the Internet I have said as much as I need to say and the world has heard enough from me.

This morning in prayer, I asked again what the Spirit had to say to me. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

I hoped for something obvious, like “Stop writing,” or “Keep going.” Instead, He said, “Be still.”

As translated by the NASB in Psalm 46:10—cease striving. I’ve spent a lot of time mulling that phrase and the Hebrew words it comes from. I picture a child’s sleeping body, utterly limp, or the perfectly still surface of a pond—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

As spoken by Jesus to the turmoil of the storm—peace, be still. Or perhaps a booming command of “Silence!” would capture the nature of His words more accurately. “And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm” (Mark 4:39b)—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

Or, as put by Moses in the face of a battle against the Egyptians—you need only to be still. To stop talking, to say nothing, to let God fight instead.

And so I release my own bracing for the impact of writing the wrong thing. I release my tension around disappointing the people I value. I am quiet, restful, limp in the hands of God, waiting to receive the word He might give me and refusing to willfully dig it out on my own strength or my own clock. Waiting for Him to do battle on my behalf.

Words keep failing me, and maybe it’s because words must fail eventually. Maybe it’s because it’s not possible to capture God and His heart and His work in the space of a few paragraphs of cold letters on a page. This has to be lived, embodied, touched, felt, known, seen, shared—for the first time I’m realizing I cannot have this walk with Jesus alone. I cannot have it online. I cannot have it only in my head, as if my truest self were just my mind, divorced from my body and heart and gut.

The convenient thing about an intellectual faith, a faith built on righteousness by good doctrine and knowledge of the Bible, is that it’s fairly self-sufficient and immensely scalable.

The inconvenient thing is it bears almost no resemblance to Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of heaven.

One is a formula I can watch on YouTube from the comfort of my home. The other is a fully embodied experience of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus that can’t be mass-produced, faked, bought, or sold.

And so of course words fail—words, which I love so much! Words which I have spent my life honing, crafting, and using to express my deepest thoughts and feelings as I learn and grow. But words can’t help but fall woefully short of the truest reality unless they, like Christ, become flesh.

Israel had many words. The Ten Commandments are called, literally, the “Ten Words”—and they had hundreds and hundreds more commands than that. They had a whole history of kings and prophets recorded in writing. And still, the Word had to become flesh.

The knowledge had to become life.

The truth had to become human.

What good have I done, if I write a dozen profound books about Jesus but fail to live and walk with Him in my real, offline life? He says “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”—and His examples are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, not writing brilliant essays of what it’s like to feed the hungry or clothe the naked.

God didn’t tell me “Stop writing” but neither did He say “Keep going.” He said, “Be still.”

So in returning and rest, I follow Jesus, and I learn to bring my whole self—not just my head—into communion with Him. It is not scalable, nor even really shareable. But it’s all that matters.