The Human Element

When we started the immigration process, I had a lot of preconceived notions about the system. Given that we began this process during the Trump era, I hired a lawyer, just to make sure our paperwork was as correct and organized as it possibly could be. I believed that following the rules would be rewarded. There are some who look for loopholes and faster ways to make it through the system, but that felt much too risky to me. We were going to do things the right way, and I hoped we would be rewarded. Not only that, but I believed that my status as a US citizen would benefit Saulo, as I would have members of Congress to advocate for me if anything went awry. Like everyone else, I have seen how scary our immigration system can be for those without any advocates, but I believed that my citizenship would shield us from that. And I might have continued believing that if his visa process hadn’t come to a complete standstill over a year ago.

I did all the things I thought would help. I reached out to the embassy; I got in touch with my representatives. They emailed the embassy and received a slightly more official and professional version of the same non-answer that I and many others had received time and again. In the meantime, we agonized over the wedding being postponed multiple times, not knowing when we could actually get married (and we still don’t know), and we mourned being separated for months at a time. Many well-meaning people have asked, “Why don’t you just get married in Brazil?”, not understanding that this would mean losing our visa and starting the process all over again. Put simply, we are stuck.

Following in greater detail what’s going on with immigration over the past year has given me even more perspective on this strange middle space where it is impossible to move forward in any one direction. I’ve learned about how others have attempted to navigate our system legally and have still become stuck. People whose employers won’t sponsor a green card or whose sponsors exploit their labor, among others who have been adversely affected by the immigration policies of Stephen Miller in the Trump era (hopefully many of these will be reversed in the years to come). Meanwhile, we all hear an ugly public debate about immigration that severely lacks in what I would call “the human element.” I hear a lot of arguments like, “If people would just do things the right way, we would be happy to welcome them into the country.” It operates on the assumption that there is some kind of reward for trusting the system.

So what is “the human element”? Families separated. Not just across borders in detention facilities (formerly known as cages) but across thousands of miles, unable to get interviews and finish the processes they paid for. Some of these applicants, those who are not family members of US citizens, may lose their chance to immigrate entirely, despite having done everything “right.” All the while, we hear the arguments that this is all meant to keep us safe from covid. I’ve watched many Americans fly back and forth to Mexico while my fiancé is not allowed to attend a 5-10 minute interview and take one flight to the US to live here.

But do you know what the heaviest part of this whole situation is? Realizing just how mild it is compared to the people who have lived this or worse for generations. The evidence of my own privilege is the way I “stepped into” this situation with the assumption that I have done enough things “right” to give us a better chance at having a smooth ride through the immigration process. I wasn’t born into into a marginalized community. This week my home state of Minnesota has been facing the trial of Derek Chauvin and the death of Daunte Wright all at once. I used to work in Brooklyn Center, and that job was my first opportunity to interact with and learn about the black community in the Twin Cities and the suburbs. The Twin Cities are highly segregated, which stems from racial housing covenants imposed on our neighborhoods over a century ago. I grew up in a small town and never knew this about Minneapolis until I moved to a suburb and started getting to know the city.

Whether talking about last year’s riots following George Floyd’s death or the riots sparked this year following Daunte Wright’s death, I have seen many white Minnesotans lament the loss of Minneapolis (or whatever status they believe the city used to have) more than they’ve mourned the loss of these men, not to mention Philando Castile, another father who was killed 5 years ago during a traffic stop. When the news cycles move on, when Minneapolis creates more bike lanes or initiates another major overhaul of 35 or 94, their families will still be mourning. And their community will be mourning with them. Do we find burning and looting more tragic than the pain of generations? Do we value property more than humanity? Do we mourn with them? Do we do what we can to protect them, to value them every day, not just when it is politically beneficial to do so?

The human element is the mourning, the rage, the desperation. I don’t want to forget to see the humanity in the person in front of me. Jesus didn’t shy away from our fear, our anger, and our confusion. He didn’t keep his distance; He moved closer. And all I want is to do the same, to begin to understand what it means to walk with people who find themselves stuck.

Room for the Unknown

A week ago I was anxiously preparing for my fourth trip to the marvelous country of Brazil, this time to stay for just under three months! Finding myself in a different context than normal always gives me the opportunity to shift my perspective, and this trip is certainly no exception. Let me provide some context on my reasons for going and the events leading up to this moment. Saulo and I just celebrated our two-year anniversary. We met while I was in the state of Bahia on a missions trip, and we realized what was happening with us about a day and a half before the trip ended. So we tearfully separated, unsure of what the next few months would bring.

When I returned home, we started planning my return to Brazil to meet Saulo’s family and spend more time together. That first four-month separation felt like an eternity at the time. We were thrilled to begin this chapter of our life together. We applied for a K-1 fiancé(e) visa shortly after I returned home, and the wait began. When the pandemic hit, we had hopes that our process would only be delayed by a few months, but after a year of separation, we needed to see each other again. So we went to London for a month, as the UK was open with some quarantine requirements at the time.

I thought things would be better after our trip to London in September. I thought the waiting would get easier because the pandemic would begin to subside and/or the US government would realize that they couldn’t keep holding back visa processing (particularly after multiple judges told them that this action is illegal). The six months that followed that trip were some of the most difficult months of my life for a whole host of reasons. Long story short, we needed another solution, unable to spend another year or more apart. God spoke to my heart back in October that it was time to go to Brazil. And all I could think was, “None of this makes any sense.”

There is always a battle raging over the hearts and minds of people. Whether it’s a political ideology, a religion, or just a belief system or worldview, there are always people trying to convince us to see the world their way. In the age of social media, we can feel this pressure even more intensely, especially if our friends or the people we follow are working hard to convince us that they are right about something. In this pandemic the thing that has been particularly difficult for me is feeling that some people see Saulo and I as the “enemy.” We are traveling; Saulo is attempting to immigrate. My government was quick to shift the blame for its own mishandling of the virus onto travelers from other countries, including family members of US citizens or those who will one day be US citizens, using this as justification to keep hundreds of thousands of families separated during a global crisis.

It’s natural for us to want to place blame on others, whether it’s illegal immigrants, college professors, Hollywood, politicians, etc. But is it really that simple to identify problems and solutions in the complexity and unpredictability of life? I have been inundated with information almost constantly since the start of the pandemic. I’ve often found myself traveling down the rabbit hole, searching for the big answers about why this is happening and how to stop it and when it will stop. Do I have a better understanding of what is happening? Perhaps. Does it change the fact that I don’t understand why things like this happen? No.

Just because I have the ability to type my questions into a search engine doesn’t mean I’ll find peace in the results. I often find even greater confusion and frustration, as it seems like everything is a fight these days. When did we all become so obsessed with being experts about everything? Because we have so much information available to us all the time, have we convinced ourselves that we are entitled to or even able to have an answer to everything?

The story of Brazil and me has been the story of shifting my expectations of the world and my life every time I’m here. When I first lived in Brazil for about one month in 2014 (in Saulo’s city, by the way), I came home a different person. I can’t totally explain it. I fell in love with Brazil, and my experience in Brazil changed everything. Then when I returned to Brazil again, my life changed direction entirely, as I began planning to marry a Brazilian. I was shocked to meet Saulo when I did; I never could have predicted it. The country that changed my life forever became a permanent fixture in my everyday life, and I think it’s just more evidence that God knows what He’s doing (and He has a good sense of humor about it too).

I want to be able to embrace the mystery that comes with life. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t attempt to learn or understand the things happening in the world today. But we need to remember a couple things as we sift through all these opinions and interpretations and perspectives: 1) some of the people attempting to convince us to accept their answer may have ulterior motives for doing so, or they may just enjoy feeling powerful and intelligent (but it doesn’t mean they’re right), and 2) if we depend on knowing all the answers in order to have peace, all we will know is anxiety. Either that, or we will so convince ourselves of our own rightness that we will become completely blind to all the ways we are wrong.

This past year has taught me to hold my opinions and expectations loosely. I’m the type of person who always has a plan, always some sense of what’s really going on. Or I thought I was. Ultimately it was all a silly attempt to feel safe and to be able to justify my own decisions to myself and to others. I’m going to be transparent here. I don’t see a way forward in my own life without dependence on God. Before now, I don’t think I had any concept of what walking by faith really means.

Walking by faith means remembering that I don’t have the answers, but I know the God who does. Walking by faith is understanding that His answers often don’t look the way I expect. Walking by faith is taking steps forward when I don’t understand what He is doing or why. Walking by faith is embracing the mystery of life and letting it lead me into trust, remembering that none of us is entitled to an easy journey. All of us put our faith in something, and I choose to let go of the burden of being the expert. God’s specialty is working beyond my ability; for the first time in my life, I have no other option than trusting that He is.

Someday When it’s Right

When asked in various surveys or personality tests whether I am a procrastinator, I will always answer no. In some ways, this answer is an accurate one, but the past several months have made me question how accurate it really is. I have always been extremely motivated to complete tasks as quickly as possible. Maybe it’s a sense of accomplishment, or maybe I just need to feel like I have a clear head that isn’t cluttered with tasks. In elementary school, I raced to complete my schoolwork during the day so that I wouldn’t have to bring any of it home. Then I would spend the rest of my time reading, trying to squeeze every last moment out of my day.

College was the same way, believe it or not. Knowing that there was some assignment or test lingering on the edges of my consciousness was enough to make me lose sleep long before any due dates. For me, there were no all-nighters. Trust me when I say that nobody wants to see or deal with me after I’ve stayed awake all night. For papers and tests, I had tried-and-true strategies that I completed over the course of a few days, and most of the time I could hold to these little routines I had.

And even after describing myself that way, I would deny being a perfectionist. I would think to myself, “No, I’m not a perfectionist. I just want things done correctly. I know it can’t necessarily be perfect, but it can be right.” This was a convenient piece of denial that kept me from seeing the way my insistence on “right” was my greatest stumbling block. It was a powerful piece of denial.

At the end of December, I started reading and working my way through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The book hit on many of my hangups when it came to my own creativity, and I’ve been able to reflect on just how wrong I was to think I was not a procrastinator or a perfectionist. Coming face to face with this was just the first step. I liked to think of this obsession with doing things right as a commitment to excellence; but when it comes down to it, I was only committed to appearing excellent in all I did, rejecting the idea that bumps and mistakes are part of the process.

Case in point, I have five blog posts sitting in my drafts on this blog (and many more I thought about and never started). I did a 30-day writing challenge last spring to try to get myself in the habit of writing every day, but once I lost the structure of that, I feel into that age-old pattern of saying I was going to start writing soon but never following through.

I would start writing a post, a song, a story, etc. I would judge it too quickly and lose my courage and motivation to finish it. This is the story of my whole life. I have drafts of stories I wrote when I was ten years old, some several pages long, and never finished. If I have an assignment, a deadline, or some external force waiting for me to finish something, I will finish and do everything to the best of my ability. Oddly enough, the deadline releases me from waiting to call it complete only when it’s perfect.

It might not be immediately apparent, but I am very aware of how far from perfect I am. Yet there’s this striving. And unfortunately it’s not a striving for excellence; my standards for myself are much too high. They are laughably unrealistic. I have found so much freedom in taking a breath and realizing that I don’t need to be perfect to be valuable. I don’t need to be perfect to be good (there’s a whole other blog post waiting in that statement). Not only that, but this whole issue rests on my own assumption that my idea of perfect actually represents perfection.

There is a lot of freedom in discovering the places in which you are your own worst enemy. I have had plenty of people in my life speak discouraging things to me about my own creativity, about my personality, my attitude, etc., as many of us have. For a long time, I blamed those people for my creative and personal hangups, all the while remaining blissfully unaware of the part my own inner critic has played in it. The truth is that I often don’t accept myself, and at this point, that’s not their fault. It’s mine. I chose to agree with them and continue the legacy of their words in my life. They may have given me some bad ideas about myself, but I incubated those ideas into beliefs and behaviors.

So for the first time in my life, I’m doing my best to set my own judgment to the side. The voice of my inner critic at times serves me well. My own judgment and problem solving skills have helped me through many challenges. But they’ve also ruled me tyrannically, made me miserable and anxious, and kept me from pursuing the things I’m passionate about. We have the power to choose our own meditations. And meditating on creation and possibility in the light of God’s words over our lives opens far more doors than criticism and perfectionism ever could.

On Responsibility

It’s been two years now since that night in Brazil when my whole life changed, when I felt the earth shift under my feet. Over the past year, I have been especially thankful for God’s clarity in those first days. He knew there couldn’t be any doubt about the journey we were beginning because we were walking headlong into a storm with absolutely no idea what was coming.

When Saulo and I confessed our feelings to each other for the first time, I thought about all the times I said that I would not want to marry someone from another country, forever split between cultures and families, dealing with cultural differences, navigating the immigration system. Only if the love were earth-shattering and absolutely certain would I ever take it on. As it turned out, this love was. I wasn’t going to find this just anywhere, and God’s voice threaded the needle from years and prayers past, making me absolutely certain of what was happening.

“It’s going to be a lot of hard work, and it’s going to be painful,” I said to Saulo that night, “but I’m ready to do this if you are.”

I had no idea.

As so often happens when you’re following God’s lead on anything, the beginning of the new season usually looks the opposite of what you expect. (Think about the Israelites and Jericho–here’s the Promised Land! Oh, wait, here’s the biggest wall I’ve ever seen.) Saulo was my first real boyfriend, and in the two years after we met, I spent more time alone than any other season of my life. Not at the office. Not at school. Not at rehearsal. This is life, at the moment, for everyone, right? In many ways, I feel blessed. I was able to meet Saulo in London and spend a month in my favorite city with my favorite person. After a year of separation, this was a time of healing for us.

When I came home, that’s when the battle truly began. If you have never found yourself caught in an immigration process during a pandemic, I can tell you that there has never been a time when I have felt so powerless or so unable to make a good decision. I was barely hanging on by a thread when we started the K-1 visa process, anxious about every little thing that could go wrong and missing Saulo like crazy in the middle of it. One thing I was so thankful for was my job. I was making more money than I ever made before (which still wasn’t much), and I finally had good benefits as well.

I saw my job as an anchor, something that would give us what we needed for the next season. Prior to the beginning of the pandemic, I was working 12 hours a day most days, teaching piano and doing accompanying on the side to try to save as much as possible for a wedding, our first apartment. etc. Money was all I thought about, and I was feeling the pressure. In the first months of his time here, Saulo won’t be allowed to get a job, and I am his sponsor. I have to make enough for the both of us.

In many ways, I have been so blessed financially. I’ve been worried about money since I was seventeen years old, when I realized that my dream of going to college could easily be cut off simply based on dollars. After graduating from grad school, being able to get through six years of school without debt (miraculously, and thanks to my parents), I didn’t feel the freedom I expected to. I was struggling to find a decent-paying job that I actually enjoyed. I felt out of my element and frustrated by my job prospects. Like many in their mid- to late twenties, I started feeling hopeless almost immediately, especially when I checked out the rent prices in the Twin Cities.

If this all just sounds like real life hitting for the first time, that’s exactly what it is. And that’s why suddenly the question became this: “What are the most important things?” At my job, despite the pay and the benefits, I was miserable. I think I had been miserable the whole time but just too busy to notice. All in the name of being more “responsible,” I stayed in the job and planned to do so for as long as possible. I was excited for those larger paychecks, and I scheduled a doctor’s appointment for the first time in a decade. However, on a personal level, everything was deteriorating quickly, and I eventually made the choice to leave that job in February.

I started thinking about what it means to be responsible and how we relate to our own ideas of responsibility in a situation where the options are so limited. I got a new job, one that pays less but makes me significantly less miserable. The amount of money I was making in my other job already wasn’t enough to appropriately afford an apartment (i.e. I would be spending significantly more than the 30% or so that you’re supposed to spend on rent every month). So when it comes down to it, what exactly was I hanging onto but the appearance of a “responsible” life without any true joy or new opportunity coming from it?

At what point does being responsible for oneself and one’s own family become about something more than a paycheck? Money is a necessary evil, and very few people that I know personally have ever been paid fairly for the work they do. We are all so affected by the culture we live in, the one designed to turn us into good tax-paying employees. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against work. But I am against a system that holds wages that are too low and benefits that are too expensive over my head in order to keep me busy and convince me to consume more and more of what it offers me. But that’s a topic for another day.

Suffice it to say that I have many other “responsibilities” in my life. To myself. To Saulo. And most importantly, to the calling God has placed on my life. I have had a lot of time to evaluate the things in my life that make me feel alive. Doing these things may involve choices that I or others would not consider “responsible.” But how do we define that anyway? Isn’t it the most “responsible” thing in the world to do what you were born to do? I’m still learning what that looks like, but knowing what comes first and what doesn’t is certainly a good first step.

2020 Book List

One of my goals for this year was to read more. Unlike most of my other goals for this year, I achieved this one and went above and beyond. My goal was to read 20 books this year. It has been a long time since I have read this much, and this book list seems to reflect my own personal journey in many ways.

Remembrance of Earth’s Past series: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End by Liu Cixin*
Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers
Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat by Stephen Sondheim
Espirito Santo: Uma Introdução by John Bevere**
Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline
When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor… and Yourself by Steve Corbett
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak
The Masterpiece by Francine Rivers
Welcome to Adulting: Navigating Faith, Friendship, Finances, and the Future by Jonathan Pokluda
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson***
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.***
When God Becomes Real by Brian Johnson
Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly
The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby****
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson****
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates***
Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement by Justin Giboney****
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander*****
Quantum Glory by Phil Mason

*I cannot recommend this series highly enough, especially for readers interested in science fiction. When asked to describe what these books are about, I say that they tell the story of humanity making first contact with life elsewhere in the universe. But this description is not enough. These books have everything: love, philosophy, politics, science, poetry. I have not been this engrossed by a series of books in a long time, maybe ever.

**The first book I have ever read in its entirety in Portuguese!

***You may notice a theme in my book selections this year. Each of these books adds valuable context to the discussion. Stony the Road, in particular, disturbed me in important ways.

****These books are especially important for Christians to read. Please read and recommend these to church groups.

*****This one gets its own special category. I read it mostly in its entirety during election week. I didn’t realize how naive I was about police power and the prison industrial complex before I read this. In combination with Just Mercy, absolutely essential reading.

Now I’m working on my reading list for 2021. What were your favorite reads of 2020? Send me your recommendations!

Passion Planning

I was excited about 2020. I started out thinking that this year’s blessings would make up for the struggles of the two years prior. This year I would get married, move into a new home, grow through exciting opportunities, move forward with my life. Had I known what this year would bring, I would have planned differently. That’s what I like to do: plan ahead. It’s funny. In anxiety, I imagined many different scenarios for this year, but large-scale shutdowns due to a pandemic was not one of them. Turns out that anxiety-induced imagination is no match for the unpredictability of life itself.

I asked for a Passion Planner for Christmas. I was so excited about it. A Passion Planner was everything I was looking for: not only plenty of room to write down all my commitments but also room to set goals and reflect on my progress throughout the year. I was thrilled to take command of the year ahead. I wanted to invest in myself as I prepared for a new season of life. I thought this year would be a crazy flurry of plans and busyness leading up to wedding celebrations in June and September. I was saving vacation days at my new job in order to have enough to celebrate with Saulo and his family and friends in June. In April, I was supposed to be an assistant teacher, accompanist, and music director for a few classes at the Guthrie Theater. And I was beyond thrilled to be a music director for a student-derived musical production in northeast Minneapolis.

I love to plan. When I was in high school, all I did was dream about college. When I was in college, I dreamed about graduate school and potential career paths. In graduate school, I dreamed about having a fulfilling career someday. And then suddenly, I graduated. The future had arrived, and I didn’t have a plan. All I had were a few ideas that didn’t pan out; I had no idea what to do. I had dreamed many futures for myself from the age of 16 onward. I had envisioned myself as a missionary, a writer, a professional musician, a professor, a music director, a humanitarian, a lawyer. Any given week, my dreaming energy could be directed at any one of these.

It was a lot more fun to dream than it was to stare my future in the face. As it turned out, finding a fulfilling job (or any job, for that matter) was much more difficult than I had anticipated. I had never struggled to find a job before. On the contrary, I often had to learn to say no because I had too many great opportunities at my disposal. But as I sat at home with my laptop scrolling through endless job listings day in and day out, I felt completely incapable of creating a plan for the first time. All those years of dreaming, and I had no idea what I wanted. Well, I did know what I wanted. The problem was that I wanted too much. I had envisioned about seven different lives for myself, and I couldn’t imagine saying no to any one of those.

Fast forward to fall 2019, and I felt like I could have all of those lives at the same time; I just had to be organized and dedicated. I could work my full-time job for a solid paycheck and benefits. I could teach piano lessons and accompany choirs after work and on weekends. I could be on the worship team at church and lead worship at youth group. I could work at the Guthrie whenever they had classes running. And I could work at the women’s shelter a couple times a month. Right? I could do everything. And I had my eyes on more; I was chasing after everything. I was running myself totally ragged, and I realized I had to make a choice about which things were going to stay in my life and which things were going to have to step aside.

So I made some difficult choices. And I asked for a Passion Planner for Christmas. My parents gave me this gorgeous black leather planner that was full of space for all my goals and plans. I wanted to recommit myself to creativity. I wanted to prioritize my self-development and career goals. I wanted to be more intentional about my free time. I wanted to be organized and I wanted to prepare myself for marriage and the responsibilities of our new season together. I wanted to be able to envision the whole year laid out in front of me and conquer all the obstacles as they arose. I made lists. I tracked dates. I dreamed about how everything would look.

You already know what happened.

Every amazing opportunity I had from March onward was cancelled. My wedding plans were pushed back and may yet have to change again. I fell into a depression. My hopes for the future were a stronger sustaining force for my present than I realized. Turns out I was more attached to my plans than I was to anything else in my life. There is a lot for me to be thankful for right now: a strong relationship with my boyfriend, a place to live rent-free, food on the table, a steady job that I can do from home, a supportive community of people, time to pursue more creative activities, and so on. But the loss of my hopes and expectations shook me to my core. Suddenly, everything in my life turned into a question mark. Everything looked like tragedy. My plans warped into premonitions–meditations on everything that could still go wrong.

When I was doing my undergrad, I went through a phase when I begged God to burst in and change my plans. I felt a sense of regret for not pursuing ministry or missions work directly, and I wanted God to wake me up in the middle of the night and say, “Darian. Go thee therefore to [fill-in-the-blank] to do My work.” I joke, but I had a real desire for that. I realized with time that God had sent me to the right place, exactly the place He intended, so He wasn’t going to call me away from there. And I’m incredibly thankful. The last two years of my undergrad were some of the most important and formative years of my life. My first two years of college were filled with doubts, struggles, and disappointments, and I felt like my plans were not working the way I had hoped. But those last two years were more than I ever could have imagined or hoped for.

We never know what lies right around the corner. We might look at our current moment and think there is no hope for the future, but life is composed of seasons. Some seasons of life are times to dream and build in obscurity, times to grow and become who we are meant to be. It doesn’t serve us to be on the mountaintop all the time, much as we would like to believe that success looks like living in constant outward victory in every aspect of our lives.

The quarantine has taught me the value of the secret place: that place where I connect with God and let His heart change mine. We live in a culture that encourages us to share everything with everyone else all the time. It’s not always a bad thing; humans are wired for connection. But I feel a sense of shame when my life doesn’t look the way I think it should based on my social media feeds. Whether it’s my body, my relationship status, my socioeconomic status, my background, my belief system–social media has a way of making me feel wrong in every category. When the quarantine started, I needed to plan. I needed to predict what would happen because all my plans were falling apart. Everything I had used to define myself in the past year was put on hold.

I had to return to the practice of letting the Creator define me. My plans had become so important to me that anything and everything else faded into the background, including being thankful for blessings of the past and the present. In a way, it was manic ambition, a clinging to the “successful life” hanging by a thread in the months and years to come. It only gave birth to greater anxiety, as I began to fear who I would be without my plans. What if things didn’t look the way I thought they should? Who would I be? How would I ever manage the disappointment?

Life is so much more. It’s not about my plans. My perspective is so limited. One twenty-six-year old white female from a small town in rural Minnesota among nearly 7.6 billion others in a world in which none of us has the ability to grasp fully even one single aspect of our lives. I’m so thankful for God’s plans. I’m so thankful for His kindness and mercy when my plans fall apart. I can’t pretend that I understand, but understanding was never the point. Relationship is what matters. Trust. I admit my own weakness in not knowing the best timing for anything. For me, the best timing is always now. But He sees me and knows me, never leaving my side when it feels like everything is falling apart. In admitting my own weakness and submitting to the process of the moment, taking in the present and leaving the future to Him, I can dream without loving the dreams more than I love the Creator who gave them to me.

Day 30: Highs and lows

The past month or so has been one of the craziest months of my entire life. I certainly did not envision May to June 2020 this way, and my disappointed expectations are part of what made this month so difficult and so important at the same time. Let’s start with the lows and work our way to the highs, with an eye toward a hopeful future.

This month I felt trapped. More than I did at the beginning of the quarantine actually. The borders closed both ways between the US and Brazil, making it impossible for me to visit my boyfriend and putting a stall on our visa process. I have experienced every part of the grief cycle multiple times, often oscillating between anger and depression. I have felt overwhelming amounts of anxiety as I searched the internet for answers that simply aren’t there. I have seen more and more things get cancelled or postponed, all while the national narrative continues to be one of ongoing and continuous doom. It’s pretty fair to say that most of 2020 has been a low point.

It would be impossible to talk about the past month without mentioning the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent riots and protests. I’ve never before witnessed anything like what happened in Minneapolis at the end of May. To see this happen in my own city, in neighborhoods I’m familiar with, made it real for me for the first time (it’s been a reality for black residents of Minnesota for a very long time). I will never forget how I felt waking up one morning and watching videos of fires and looting across the city. And I’ll never forget watching George Floyd’s murder, seeing the images that rightfully sparked outrage and a call for change across the entire world. I truly believe good is and will continue to come out of this. I have already seen change. I’ve seen humility in many white people who are acknowledging that they hadn’t recognized the stain of racism in their own communities. I’ve seen white people who are finally ready to listen to the pain and suffering of the black community. I’ve seen black people rise up with a voice for change and for reconciliation. I’ve seen a change in myself as I recognize the urgency of fighting racism actively.

Next, I want to focus on where I’m going and what I’m learning, in spite of the chaos and pain of this season. Finishing this writing challenge is a highlight of the past month, as I generally have had a poor track record of finishing things that I start when I don’t have an externally enforced deadline. Not only has this challenged helped me to form a daily writing habit, but it has also helped me become more bold in sharing my own story in writing form. I have received a lot of positive feedback from readers, and I honestly didn’t expect anyone to read what I wrote here. I didn’t expect to dive so deeply into my own vulnerability and share it with others, but I think it’s what needed to happen. For nearly my whole life, I have been consumed with putting on a happy face rather than sharing what’s really going on, and this entire crisis has forced me to reach out, if for no other reason than needing to know I’m not alone.

Most importantly, I’ve learned what it is to choose hope and strengthen myself in the Lord. I’ve heard it said many times that you are blessed when God is your only option. I find myself in that situation right now. I absolutely must trust God or I won’t have anything left to stand on. What I’m learning is that trusting God is about more than trusting Him for the breakthrough or the solution to a problem. It’s also about the day-to-day battle with fear and anxiety. It’s about trusting Him with my anger and my vulnerability and being willing not only to accept the truth but to believe it in hope and faith. It’s about choosing love instead of fear.

I believe that this time at home is special for many reasons. I have the ability to worship and pray throughout my day and give God the space to give me what I need. In the past, I have been guilty of making myself busy, especially in times of stress, in order to cope with the anxiety. But it’s the opposite of what needs to happen. Rather than a coping strategy, I need truth to stand on. I have to be open to that truth and ready to receive and believe it, regardless of today’s headlines. It’s not about denying the current situation and the challenges we face, but instead about allowing truth to reign over it in spite of our limited perspective. God sees the beginning from the end, which I can easily say is a much broader perspective than I could ever offer.

I want to thank everyone who has been on this journey with me. I’m truly blessed that anyone wants to read anything that I write, and the clarity that this month has given me is beyond what I ever expected or hoped. There will be more blog posts to come. I have a lot of ideas I’m ready to explore.

Day 29: Goals for the next 30 days

My first goal is to keep writing. Not only has this been a cleansing process for me, but many people have reached out and encouraged me to continue beyond this 30-day challenge. I would like to spend more time not only writing these personal essays but also writing fiction and other types of creative non-fiction. Ultimately, the most important thing for me to remember is that the daily practice is the most important thing. Write something every day; just keep writing, writing, and writing. Several new ideas have sparked in my head over the course of this challenge, and I want to continue what I’ve started, exploring new territory as I go.

Another goal is to be thankful. The negativity of the past few months has really been weighing me down. I have had longer seasons of loneliness and disappointment in my life before. But, to be honest, I hoped I would never have a season like that again. However, another way to look at this is to acknowledge that I survived a season much like this one before: a season when I felt trapped and afraid that I would never be able to move on from where I was. One of the best ways to fight off despair is to say yes to thankfulness. Even now, I have so much to be thankful for. Naming the things I’m thankful for gives me the right perspective that I need to live even this time to its fullest.

In that same vein, I want to pursue connection with God and my community in this time. I have come to realize that my relationship with God has been a little disconnected over the past couple of years. Due to the pain of disappointments that had piled up over the past several years, I had stopped trusting that God has good plans for my life and cares about what I’m experiencing day-to-day. I began to shift between a performance mindset based in shame (“What if I’m doing something wrong and that’s why God’s promise isn’t coming true in my life?”) to utter cynicism and hopelessness (“What difference does it make how I use this time if God is abandoning me?”). Neither of these mindsets allows me to maintain a close connection with God or the people around me. Rather, I want to focus on lifting up praise to Him in the midst of uncertainty, declaring His love and favor over me and those around me.

Finally, I want to stop worrying and say no to fear. This season has brought out the fearfulness in many of us. I certainly didn’t realize how deep my fears were until this season brought everything to the surface. The disconnection from God and others that I mentioned above–this has largely been a result of my fear and anxiety. This is why I have to choose love from here on out. I don’t know if this figure is correct, but I remember someone saying once that the words “Do not fear” appear in the Bible 365 times. Enough for every single day. What’s more, Jesus literally tells us, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” My mom gave me some of the best advice for this season. She told me not to borrow problems from tomorrow and bring them into today. There is grace for every single day. We just have to keep moving forward, trusting that God will provide for our needs day-by-day.

Day 28: Five things that make you laugh out loud

It is a breath of fresh air to write a post about laughter. Never underestimate the power of setting everything aside for a while to laugh!

1) Psych

If you’ve known me any great length of time, you know my passion for the USA series Psych. I started watching Psych when it entered into its fourth season and absolutely fell in love with everything about this show. It’s random and weird and quirky and uproariously funny. There are so many jokes, hidden pineapples, and 80s references in this show that I always laugh at new jokes every time I rewatch the series. Without fail, this series can always make me laugh, and it’s usually the first place I turn when I’m really feeling down.

I could also list a whole bunch of other shows in this category, such as The Office, Parks & Rec, and Brooklyn 99. I’ve pretty much got these shows on rotation all the time.

2) My boyfriend

One of the first things I noticed about Saulo was his sense of humor. I should’ve known he was the one for me the minute he referenced Ferris Bueller on one of our bus rides when I first met him. It could be because I’m absolutely crazy about him, but he always makes me laugh. He actually has this really great talent of being able to diffuse tension. I’m the type of person who tends to take everything too seriously and too personally all the time. This is part of the reason I know Saulo is such a stellar match for me, because he can make me laugh in moments when I’m feeling really stressed. Long-distance relationships are difficult, and you have to be able to experience the joy of being in love with someone in creative ways. Especially now, when we have so many roadblocks to being able to see each other this year, humor has been something in our relationship that helps us lighten up a bit and keep going.

3) SNL sketches

Lately, my parents and I have gotten really burnt out on media. We started watching a Netflix series that was a bit of an emotional burden to watch, and it’s difficult to keep going with something like that when life is stressful and dark enough as it is. So we have tried to find lighter movies to watch, like comedies or musicals, to release the tension a little bit. We’ve also been surfing YouTube and finding our favorite SNL sketches. There are some that never fail to make me laugh out loud.

Some favorites are The Californians, Debbie Downer, More Cowbell, and many, many more. My parents also suggest sketches from before my time, which are always fun to watch.

4) My Brother, My Brother, and Me

My Brother, My Brother, and Me (MBMBaM) is a podcast for the “modren” era. It’s three brothers–Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy–giving out advice about anything and everything imaginable. One of my good friends recommended this podcast to me a couple years ago, and I’ve listened to the weekly episode ever since. Some people have even created animations of the best bits, and I’ve watched these over and over again. The show is incredibly silly, which definitely provides me with something completely random to focus on for an hour a week.

5) Vines

Here is my special tribute to vines. Remember Vine? We all thought six-second videos were such a stupid idea, but it turns out that six seconds is plenty of time to make an impression. What I love about vines is how chaotic the energy is. Some of them have so much story to them that you think to yourself, “There’s no way this is only six seconds.” And others are so chaotic that watching them over and over again just makes them funnier. As many others have done, I have been leaning on TikTok for some comic relief during the quarantine, and I will give credit where it’s due. TikTok is fun, and I’ve enjoyed it. But for me, vines will always be the OG.

Day 27: Something that’s going great right now

It doesn’t feel like anything is going great right now. Not on the surface, at least. Disappointment and frustration don’t feel like strong enough words to describe what I feel most days. To a certain extent, my strategy to get through this thing has been to put my head down and let the days blend together. Before I know it, another few months will have passed. I wonder sometimes if I should just hibernate and someone could wake me up when “spring” arrives. But we can’t do that. As painful as all of this is, maybe what we really need is to walk through it, learning how to keep our hope intact in the face of so many terrible situations.

This year I have seen a lot of ugly things. I’ve never seen so many people wish an illness on others on the internet. No matter one’s views on how best to fight the pandemic, I can’t imagine wishing an illness on anybody else, even an enemy. We saw George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery (among others) murdered within the past few months and have felt the rage and pain of the black community sweep across the nation and the world. These are difficult times. However, in spite of forces still working to divide us, I have seen unity in America like I have not seen before. I’ve seen people become more open to listening and learning. I’ve seen people begin advocating for others. I’ve seen our focus shift toward devoting more energy to protecting the vulnerable and freeing the oppressed among us.

I have an expectation that things should come easily if I do everything I am supposed to do. If I do things right, I will have good results. It’s a childish way of thinking, reflecting my desire as a young girl to gain approval, acceptance, and opportunity by being obedient and responsible. It didn’t work when I was a child, and it’s pretty laughable now. I’m learning that the most worthwhile things in life are the things we have to fight for. This year people are taking on the battle for the worthwhile things, knowing that they are fighting for something precious.

My own personal battle is the fight against fear. As I’ve watched fear grip the country, I’ve had to come face-to-face with my own fear. For the first time, I recognize that I can’t move forward with it. I can’t win the fight against hopelessness if the core of my being operates from a place of fear. Fear immobilizes. Hope catalyzes.

To a certain extent, just winning the battle against hopelessness can be one of the greatest things we ever do. If we have hope, we can actually accomplish something. Look at what is happening right now. More people are waking up and envisioning a better world for our black neighbors: a world in which they are viewed and treated as the valid and precious human beings that they are. I’m inspired by that hope. Cynical people won’t take on the battle; hopeful people will, believing that their efforts can lead to real progress.

I still haven’t answered the question: what is going really great for me right now? My definition of “going great” is changing. I don’t feel good. I want that to be clear. I do my best to be positive, but it’s not something that comes easily right now. I used to define whether something was “going great” by how I felt about it. I used to define it by how happy I was. I’m not happy right now. My dreams for this year have been put on hold. I’m grieved by the general state of things in the world. And somehow I miss how things used to be, while at the same time never wanting things to go back to the way they were before.

But the truth is… I don’t have to be happy in order for something to be “going great.” Choosing to stay positive in the face of negativity and strife, choosing to continue moving forward when everyone is yelling about how the sky is falling–don’t these mean more than simply being happy because everything is easy? It doesn’t feel good, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact, the fact that it doesn’t feel good might be the most important thing about it.

Maybe I’m not making any sense. My mind is jumbled with all these conflicting emotions. What I’m trying to say is this: sometimes just keeping your hopes up is enough, especially in the moments when it’s most difficult to do so. It doesn’t feel great, but I’m still fighting for it. Maybe that means it’s going great, even on days when it’s a labor to continue. We must continue. We must not give in to despair. Only hope can continue to move us forward.