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I have not spoken out about the immigration issue so far and I know so many people are urging/pushing spiritual leaders to step up and take a stand. I’ve written at least five different posts. I’ve read so many articles, watched so many videos. I’ve been scouring scripture for direction in terms of wording and wisdom. But all I can say is I haven’t yet felt okay about pushing that ‘post’ button.
Not because I’m afraid of people unfriending me, but because I feel like this issue has too many tentacles to reduce into a paragraph, written by a pastor with a teaspoonful of information and a truckload of passion.
I don’t want to add to the noise unless it will be helpful and it seems like most of the online arguments I’m reading only serve to further entrench people in their already-held opinion.
But the other night, as I was snuggled up with my grandsons on the couch (they were watching Captain Underpants, which is slightly inappropriate but hilarious and I hope I’m not in trouble with their parents), I ran into the audio of kids crying for their parents. I’ve been a mom long enough to recognize the sounds of terror-through-tears.
You recognize it, too, even if you’ve never been a mom.
I kept looking at my little guys, imagining the unimaginable. How our hearts would break. How their lives and mindsets and worldview would be impacted by that ONE moment. It made me wish that EVERY one of those kids could be sitting on a sofa with someone who loves them; someone they know would fight for them, die for them. How truly, terribly fortunate my sweethearts are to have been born on this soil, breathing freedom as a birthright (and please don’t correct me here to the word “blessed”, which would imply that Jesus loves Finn and Greyson more than He loves the kids with no couch to call home.)
It astounds me that this is not happening in the outer reaches of countries I can’t find on the map; it’s happening here in the land that I love. The home of the free is putting children in cages? That can’t be right.
And then I read the arguments from people defending President Trump (because I haven’t heard anyone defend the practice, just the President’s role in it.) Many said it’s not his fault – W started this; Obama continued it. Many said this is just a conspiracy to turn people against him. Many said those kids have it better in our cages than they do in their homes. Some argued that “kids in cages” is inflammatory and inaccurate – they are “detention cells.”
One said: America is a nation of laws and we don’t get to follow the laws we like and change the ones we don’t. (Note: America is a nation of PEOPLE and we certainly DO get to change the laws we don’t like if enough of us don’t like them. That’s precisely why women get to vote and rich people can’t own poor people.)
Most said this situation isn’t perfect, but what else are we going to do? The parents brought it on themselves, and their littles by extension.
All those arguments have points of interest. But I don’t care about them. In fact, I think those arguments are some of the most dangerous threats to our humanity, because they give us the semblance of a cause and it takes precious mental, emotional and physical energy to defend our causes – even the unworthy ones. Especially the unworthy ones.
I’d like to suggest that by the time we’re arguing over the definition of a “cage”, we’ve well and truly lost sight of the point. And when we make this primarily a referendum against our president, we’ve equally missed the point.
The more energy we invest in blaming someone or defending someone else or throwing our hands up in despair because this problem is just TOO BIG for us, the less energy we’ll throw where we need to throw it – indeed, the ONLY place our energy can flow that I think honors God: finding a solution.
We, the nation that sent men to the moon, can certainly find a way to send children to sofas where they can be safe, be loved, be children.
We must.
We must stop barking and blaming and start thinking and giving and loving.
We must invest at least the amount of creative heat to making the world a better place for children that we invest in making memes for Instagram. Even if our constitution doesn’t demand it, our Bible does.
So, what I think we need right now is hope. Hope and a holy agitation to turn this friction into traction. Hope that we can be a part of something new and beautiful and exciting and generational.
I started by giving to www.togetherrising.org. 100% of their donations are going to secure lawyers for unrepresented children, with a goal of reunifying them with their parents. I’m asking Jesus for more ideas to help bring hope and change. If you have them I’d sure love to hear them. I don’t really want to hear your arguments…but I absolutely DO want to hear any plan – no matter how crazy it may seem – for helping these beautiful kids find a voice in all of this noise. Does it seem impossible? Perfect. America was built on the fight for impossible freedom.
We were made for this.
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Heyo, friends of mine! So many of you have kindly mentioned to me that the blogging has not so much been happening since I got back from Italy. I know. I have been MIA recently and there are reasons but none of them are particularly interesting or exciting so please pretend that I listed the reasons out here and you were all “ooohhh…” “ahhhhh….” “I get it, now…”
But for real, one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much is because I have been working on building some NEW and EXCITING and WONDERFUL things that will be launching SO SO SOON (please note: these all caps are intentional and not because I’m aging rapidly and cannot see things close up) (but also: I am aging rapidly and cannot see things close up.)
New & Exciting Thing #1:
For years, I’ve had a desire to put real energy and mind-muscle into helping women learn to become better communicators of both the Word of God and words in general.
I believe every woman has a story to tell that can change the world – but often lacks the confidence, skill and resources to get that story out on the stage or on the page.
My deep passion is to help women use words effectively and beautifully. That is what I love and, therefore, that is what I shall do (because doing what we love is the best kind of magical.)
I want to help women understand their place in the world of words, men, lexicons and lecterns. Let’s get after this, ladies! There are stories to tell and the big, brilliant gospel to share!
This adventure will take the shape of conferences and consulting wherein I get bossy about the things of which I am certain and honest about the ways I’ve failed in the past twenty years while standing behind a podium or sitting at a keyboard. It’s going to be a good time!
New & Exciting Thing #2:
Another passion of mine is to help women who feel stuck. After twenty years of speaking at just less than 1 BILLION women’s events (number is approximate), I am deeply concerned about the State of Affairs among the women of the world. I’ve met very few who are passionate, determined, happy and fulfilled.
The rest are….waiting.
- Waiting for their real lives to begin.
- Waiting for sorrow or disappointment or disillusionament to stop controlling them.
- Waiting for permission to be seen and heard.
- Waiting to feel qualified.
- Waiting for the chance to truly make a difference with their beautiful lives.
Sisters, this ought not be! Of all the people on the planet, women who love and follow the ways and words of Jesus, should be the most wonderfully wild and free and should say the most exuberant “YES!” to His purpose(s) for each day they’re given. I have been building a seven-hour intensive – the Wild & Free Conference – around this one issue. Created out of the beauty I found on the battlefield and the strategy I used while re-starting my life during my first year of widowhood, it is four hours of teaching + three hours of personal coursework + thirty days followup assignments and journaling. Not gonna lie, it is intense. It is deep. It is challenging. But I think women are ready for exactly this kind of adventure. If you feel too young to settle for the life you have now, but too old to try anything new, this will be the event for you.
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New & Exciting (and bittersweet) Thing #3:
This one has to do with #1 & #2. I will be launching a new website! My current blog has been my baby since 2007. It has seen me through sickness, health, grand babies, career changes and death. It holds my thoughts through the deepest valleys of heartache, the green pastures of peace and the harrowing highways of the Shadowlands. It will always be dear and important to me, but it is time for a new Yes. The new blog is not the “yes” – but it is the room where we can all hang out and talk about the yes’s we are saying and living and dreaming. I’m so excited to announce that the new living room for my thoughts and adventures will be called SHEology. It will have everything from study tips to speaker tricks to lipstick recommendations and book reviews. It will also contain a lot of resources for surviving tragedy, loss and pain, because that’s my lane and I try to stay in it. Mostly, it will be a place that gives you permission to be your very best and very worst and very truest self.
So, those are the things and I am bursting at the seams to share all the new with you! I’ll keep posting updates as we go – here on this website and on my facebook and instagram. I’ll also share the old, steady things as well: I still love my job at Westside, I love my people, I love my city and I’m happier than I’ve been in a very long time. It’s the blend of old and new that makes life so beautiful, don’t you think?
Can’t wait to meet you out on the edge of the wild!
With hope,
Bo
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I married Steve when I was 19, having lived with my sister before that and a bunch of college women before that and my parents before that. I was steeped in the tea of togetherness for as long as I could remember. If there was one thing I really craved for most of my life, it wasn’t more people but more solitude.
When Steve got sick in 2011 and then died in 2015, I was worried about a lot of things, like finances and kids and decisions about our house – but I wasn’t overly worried about being lonely. I knew I would miss him, but I really felt that I was the kind of person who could handle long stretches of aloneness. Other than a specific, recurring nightmare that I had to spend Christmas alone (I know – it’s weird what our brain conjures up, isn’t it?) I felt like I was well equipped and prepared to face my new life without a spouse. And it went pretty well for the first year. I don’t have much more to say about it than that – maybe I didn’t have time to focus on it while trying to rebuild a life for my family, but I don’t remember it being a pressing issue.
Recently, though, especially since returning from Italy, I have discovered the dark, quiet of a lonely life in ways I had never imagined before. I can’t say exactly why it’s happening or why it’s so hard now, I can only say with certainty that it is. And yeah, I have kids living here (though they aren’t here much) and I have a great man just three hours away and friends and family who love me. Yet, often when I wander through my empty house, the silence and solitude feel crushing, suffocating. I run into it in the wee hours, when I wake up alone in my bed, alone in my room – and I gasp to get air, to get hope into my lungs and I clutch the covers tightly and try to hang on until morning. Sometimes I decide that 4:00 a.m. is close enough to morning and I get up, make coffee and run to the refuge of my couch, waiting for the sun to shine beams through the window and remind me that a new day = new mercy.
Let me be clear: this is not a desperate cry for help. My friends and family care for me SO well. My kids are unfailingly kind and thoughtful. My boyfriend works hard to make sure we connect every day and to be available when I need him. I am the luckiest girl in all the land to have such amazing people in my life.
And yet, there’s something about being single that is weary and wearing. Coming home to an empty house often, going to bed alone every night, facing each day on my own, even just sitting down to pay the bills alone…these things create the ethos of my existence. They are unchanging and sometimes unrelenting in their gnawing, empty consistency. Is Jesus in this season? Without a doubt – I feel Him more present than ever before. Is He precious and good and true to His word? Absolutely. But sometimes my heart still feels overwhelmed by all this quiet.
So, what to do with loneliness? I think my best and worst answer is: I don’t know yet. I thought I knew a year ago, but turns out it just wasn’t really an issue then. And I know what I should say: Read your Bible, play worship music, lean into Jesus – fine ideas, all. But they ring a bit hollow for those who are longing to feel the warmth and camaraderie of a skin-and-bones human, or ache to feel circled by the kind of always-available friendship you don’t have to work up or work for.
Here’s where I want to give you a principle or three. I want to wrap it all up in hope and five steps to happiness. But the only hope I have to give the lonely today is this: I’m here, too. Lots of us live right here in the quiet wild. Just because you love Him, doesn’t mean you don’t feel it and just because you feel it, doesn’t mean you’re doing life wrong. It just means you’re doing life. And I’m proud of you and cheering you on from the cheap seats. Please know it. (And leave a comment if you’ve got a great idea for the rest of us!)
With hope,
Bo
I’ve been sitting long and quiet this morning, trying to figure out whether or not to share something out loud. It feels extra vulnerable, which is why it’s a fight to wrap it into words, but also why I need to.
For months, I have been dealing with suffocating anxiety over a health issue in my life. Health stuff is a powerful trigger for me. My friends and sweetheart have extended endless kindness, compassion and patience as I’ve cried my way through sleepless nights, but also refused to get actual answers to the issue I was facing. All the worry finally culminated in a trip to Portland to see a friend of mine who is a doctor, who ordered the tests I had been avoiding since September. He ended our visit with one powerful sentence that keeps reverberating in my head: “The one and only question we need to answer today, Bo, is: Do you trust God with your whole life?” The night before the tests, I tossed and turned in my bed, writing a story in my head of the disaster that awaited inside those results. Just as I considered the idea of canceling the appointment in the morning, I heard a tiny voice in my spirit say, “That test is the only door out of the life you’re living now.” And I knew the voice was right. I loathe living in fear and taking a hard run at that door was the only way out, even if I faced something difficult on the other side. I had to reluctantly agree that any reality was a better option than living in the unknown, because real grace meets us in our real stories.
Results: I had the tests and I am healthy and fine. I’m trying not to focus on the many minutes and months I lost to anxiety, but it’s tough – because the door was there the whole time and I was afraid to use it. I wasted so much energy and sacrificed so much peace.
I share this only because I have run into so many people this week who are dealing with the very same issue, packaged up in different circumstances. Sometimes a situation seems so complex that everything looks like a house of mirrors, but I believe there is always a door. It may not be the final door to freedom, but it is the next door in the process. If you’re locked up in a life filled with fear or doubt or confusion, the one and only question you need to answer immediately is: Do you trust God with your whole life? And the only thing you need to do is take a real hard run at that door.
With hope and courage,
Bo
The Italians I met while in Florence have one thing in common: they are content with their lives and feel lucky to be living them. Most of them have spent time in America – usually more than a year – and they perceive the American way as being quite difficult and angsty. They feel we are obsessed with having the best of everything and in achieving notoriety. My new friend, Daniel, said, “Americans have to find the best coffee, the best place to eat – here, we can just sit in a piazza that’s really nothing special and drink coffee without worrying if it’s the best or if we’re seen having the best. We just enjoy sitting and living in the beauty of that one moment.” He mentioned that in America, he felt he couldn’t take a break just to live – it had to be consumed with work or striving or getting more.
Another man runs a beautiful leather shop around the corner from my apartment. At the end of our shopping trip, enamored by his knowledge and customer service skills, one of us said, “Paolo, you’re going to be famous!” He smiled and shook his head like we had offered him a shot glass full of rat poison. “Oh, no. I don’t want fame. I only want to love what I do. Fame is not good for people.” He expounded a little, and I don’t remember all that he said, but his implication was clear: Americans love fame, Italians understand that fame is too much work.
I want to agree with them, while adding a personal disclaimer for my own lifestyle. Yeah, that’s how Americans are, but not me. Poor, poor Americans. However, I can’t deny it’s a part of me as I wander the streets looking for the best restaurants and the best shops and the best things to bring home – and in the way I feel I’ve wasted a moment if I haven’t captured it in photos or words on a page. I see it in myself as I enjoy the most beautiful wine country landscape I’ve ever laid eyes on, while fighting a driving impatience to get to the next vineyard and see if it’s better. I miss entire moments of my life – wide swaths of time and experience, in fact – because I’m so busy processing whether or not that experience does or does not live up to my expectations.
And this is what I want to bring home – not from Italy, but from Italians. I want their deep love of family and hospitality, yes, but more than that – their deep love of living in exactly the moment they’re in with exactly the things that they have. I want to live a life that is able to sink deep roots into the rich soil of the right-here, right-now beauty I’ve been given. I want to refuse the endless, aching longing for attention, admiration and just “more and better” that swallows the wonder of a million little ordinary blessings whole. It will be hard because I’ve been this way a long time; but contentment + gratitude = peace; and that is the goal I’m bringing home.
With hope and great gratitude to the people in Florence who have shared their lives with me,
Bo
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Audrey Paice - THANK YOU, Bo. I have also tried to stay away from online posts on political topics because it feels like “adding to the noise” but this is a humanity issue and my convictions would not let me stay silent. Thank you for your wisdom and words that cut to the point.
One other thing I’ve found as an option, any option, to care for these precious littles caught in horrific circumstances is to write letters and/or send teddy bears to Operation Comfort, 4470 West Sunset Blvd, Box 217, Los Angeles, CA 90027.
At the end of the day no amount of letters and teddy bears will matter more than reconnecting these families of course, thank you for highlighting Rising Together.
Lori Greenstone - Yes to all of that. I love how you ground your argument and set in on a couch.
Becky Jo Pas - God the Almighty could have prevented this.
Dan Belles - I agree with the need for care, protection and love of those separated families. We also have families old and young and everything in-between and for a multitude of reasons that have been separated. There are veterans who haven’t been cared for, children in our foster systems and are otherwise separated due to parental incarceration or neglect, etc.
This nation has a lot of needy people in horrendous situations who are not getting this (media/political)kind of attention. We the people and we the church need to give love and support (physical and/or financial) to the needy; however God calls us. Individually we can’t do it all, but collectively we can and should do more.
I feel for those who have been caught up in the border wars (that is tragic on many levels), but let’s not forget our own citizens in the midst of this chaos.
Flor Nuñez - Dear Bo,
Thank you for taking your time and your thoughts, for displaying them in such a graceful and clear way. Thank for being bold, for being wise. Thank you for letting Jesus use you to encourage His people to do the right thing. I completely agree with you.
Holly Witte - This is so smart, so sweet, so needed. Your are a really good writer. Here is my struggle…we know Jesus and God do not want the terrible things – mass shootings, holocausts, famine, ethnic cleansing and on and on. Instead, we have been given free will, which certainly seems to be the cause of some of the suffering. How do we rely on God and faith and still take action? I have had personal experiences so I know God is the answer but I struggle with why there is so much sadness.
Gail Orr - Amen and amen!! Couldn’t be more right on! Stop the blame/defending, protect the defenseless above all!!
Annie Chevalie'r - This is wonderful. I have someone I know in Ohio who is a Pastor and an Immigration attorney. I will send that link to him and believe for more donations. He has over some 2,000 friends on Facebook and over 10,000 follower’s
Joyce Pieser - Yes this is sad for defenseless children brought over by irresponsible parents. But what is more sad is all the children born in this country that live in miserable horrendous conditions for years and they are being ignored. I live in Texas and currently there are 79,000 children being sex trafficked just in this state. A refuge ranch close to me will be opening soon for 44 rescued sex trafficked kids. One of the leaders of this ranch was herself trafficked at the age of 6. Now in her 40’s she is still struggling to be a whole person. Why are people not in an outrage and trying to do what they can to help with this? I guess it is because there is no political gains that can come from doing something. I pray people will wake up and start helping in their own backyards and leave the illegals for our government to find a remedy.
Curt Sell - Thank you for your thoughtful words on this difficult topic. What a better nation we would live in if this approach was taken on EVERY political or social issue. Sometimes we forget that we are a country full of PEOPLE not just non-human political positions. Your challenge to brainstorm solutions and show compassion to ALL people is exactly what we need moving forward. Thank you for taking the time to write this.
Steve Krodman - This post captures the very reason we, as a nation, seem to have lost sight of our moorings (a mixed metaphor if ever I’ve written one)! Thanks for your eloquence and gracious heart.
I found you thanks to your post about living with ALS. You nailed it, darling. I call it “walking on Jupiter.”