How To Tell A New Story

In which everything is changing. Here, too.

Twice now I have stood alone and spoken these words to a church full of others waiting in the darkness.

In the beginning,
when God created the heavens and the earth,
the earth was a formless wasteland,
and darkness covered the abyss,
while a mighty wind swept over the waters

I spoke these first words of Scripture and then I turned and walked away, and the first son I bore into this world of darkness leaned into his own microphone and picked up where I left off:

Then God said,"Let there be light,"
and there was light.

Last year the words felt delicious. The favorite story of my childhood.

But this year my head and heart throbbed through the whole Easter Vigil.

please don’t let it be cancer please don’t let it be cancer please don’t let it be cancer

A formless wasteland. A darkness. An abyss.

My phone buzzed on Easter Monday.

New test result waiting for you in MyChart.

Cancer.

//

“Sickness really makes people think. I know that when I get better I’m going to be a totally changed person. Actually that is too bad because I kind of liked the person I was. I mean I tried to be compassionate and a good influence on others. But I guess I could always tell that there was something about me that had to change.”

My brother Jay wrote this in his journal shortly after he was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer.

He died when he was 21.

I was 10.

I have tried to tell that story a thousand different ways, but we default to the simplest statements in the biggest moments. I narrate my daughters’ deaths the same way.

In-utero surgery to try to save them. Surgery was unsuccessful. Had to be born via c-section. Too sick to survive. Maggie lived 1 day. Abby lived 2.

The hardest facts of my life, spelled out for you in black letters on a white screen, written in 26 simple characters. The human condition is unrelenting, vast variations on a terrible theme, but we share the same alphabet of suffering.

In the beginning, darkness.

What do you do when you run out of words? Especially when you have given your life to their calling?

You go back to the beginning. You start a new chapter. You pick another story.

These are all the same move.

Darkness covers. Spirit hovers. The Word speaks. Let there be light.

//

I have scribbled exactly one date in my Bible, and it was the day this week I decided (claimed? admitted? realized? accepted? delighted?) that I was a theologian.

For the past 17 years, I have given my life to the study, teaching, preaching, writing, and love of theology. But I never got that PhD, never joined the guild, never earned the title, never served the school, never received the right to call myself what I was.

But when everything you know and love is suddenly threatened, every rug where you once stood firm yanked out from beneath you, the truth of your life becomes crystal clear.

I have been a theologian all along. Public theology for the people of God has always been the work of my life. Right alongside writing and motherhood and marriage.

After Maggie and Abby died, I felt no-longer-afraid. The worst thing had happened. I was now a parent who had held two children in my arms as they died and then buried them in the ground. Why live my life small or scared anymore?

So I had another child. And another.

I decided to leave work I loved for the writing I knew was my calling.

All of it was terrifying, on one hand. All of it was the opposite, on the other.

Then cancer came. I stared at the blinking words on my screen, rearranging my life with their letters. Invasive ductal carcinoma.

And when I looked up, I saw the life I loved around me. My children. My spouse. My family. My friends. My work. The only things that matter.

I will not live this life scared or small. I will step in what I was all along, and I will write that date down in the sacred book that has shaped my entire existence.

Let there be light.

//

To mark the four life-saving infusions of this first round of treatment, I bought myself four tiny journals. Each book will become its own story. I need a new place to write what is happening anew.

I am not my brother. I am not my daughters. What happened once will not happen again.

But I need the freedom, the permission, the safety, and the space to tell a new story.

Here, too. What was can no longer be. Because in six short weeks, my whole life has been rearranged, all the furniture cleared out, then dragged back in, then shoved around, then half-thrown out and started over.

Thank you for joining me here. For widening the freedom, the permission, the safety, and the space to tell new stories. I have so much I am itching to tell you—so much grace, so much God, so much clarity amid chaos. I have never loved life more or understood it better, and that wild truth feels like nailing the chairs to the ceiling and trying to sit in them without tumbling. Nothing makes sense and everything makes sense, and as I have been doing for nearly two decades of my life, I will try my best to share with you what I am discovering of God, that you might peer into the darkest corners of your own life and wonder something of the same.

Everything is changing, but the 26 slim letters we have to share are what remain, and this is the alphabet of grace.

Let there be light.