Most years I come to this writing process full of thoughts, ideas, and feelings about the coming year. Usually I have done weeks if not months of mental pre-work for sketching out the coming year.
This year is not like that. Having been previously counted as “high capacity” as a worker or leader, I find that all that capacity has been sucked up by getting through nearly two years at the front lines of the pandemic, along with the mental, spiritual, and physical fallout that have continually exacerbated things. I’m in a different place and I’m pretty sure I’m a different person.
But let’s see where we can get to.
spiritual landscape
This year will be my 7th year of listening through the Bible in a year. I had tried many times to read through in a year and had never come even a little close to managing it. In 2016 I paid for the Daily Audio Bible app on my phone (these days it is free, but back then it cost) and I dug in, listening every morning very first thing, either before I even got out of bed, or while I showered and got ready for work.
I did not understand how dramatically that one decision was going to change my life.
Listening through somehow shifted me from seeing it all as “lessons for life” to a lens on very real people living very real lives…and that made it hard. That first year was scary for me as I listened through, finding myself yelling at God, “What am I supposed to do with THAT?!” while I processed stories differently or heard things I didn’t recall ever having heard or read throughout my entire life in church (where I had not only been learning and studying but also quite regularly teaching and/or leading). I had just wanted to do a good thing in reading all the way through with intention, and then I was left wondering if I was even going to count as a Christian anymore by the time I got through the year.
These days it’s becoming popular for some pastors to decry the “trend” of deconstruction, implying that people are jumping on a fad, trying to be cool, etc. I didn’t even know the word “deconstruction” in 2016 when I actually started deconstructing. I wasn’t seeking to upset the applecart of my faith – I didn’t go looking to deconstruct, but rather kind of tripped into it in the process of trying to be as faithful as possible. Along the way, I noticed that some other people seemed to be in the same boat as me, much to my relief, and eventually I have come to believe that there is a great shift happening in the church that will, in the context of history, perhaps one day be shown as just as significant and dramatic as the Protestant Reformation.
For me, deconstruction has looked like:
- The aforementioned wrestling with scripture. I am still very engaged on a daily basis with the Bible, but my relationship with it and my understanding of it have dramatically changed over the past six years.
- Slowly and somewhat systematically picking up first the more tangential things and eventually even the most basic elements of my faith for a whole different level of examination, asking myself why I believe what I believe and taking a hard look at what others have believed across the span of the history of the faith, rather than just here in modern day ‘Murica and the evangelical culture of which I no longer count myself a member.
- Really trying to sort out how much of what I believe is because God says so as evidenced by the Bible actually saying AND meaning it that way, and how much is the modern understanding in my culture that is not really connected to the original intent when written down so very long ago and far away.
- Sitting with the dissonance, where I don’t understand or have answers, and just trusting that God is taking me on a journey and it’s not my job to know it all…just to be open to learning and changing.
The journey has been painful and frightening, but also interesting and even sometimes satisfying or even exciting. It’s not a journey I want to pull anyone into – the last thing I want to do is pull someone out of a faith context that is working in their lives to be uncomfortable with me. So I have been quiet about it more often than not, and likely will continue to be.
Here’s a thing that has just begun to come to me in the past week or so: from what I understand, Jewish culture has a thing about the number 7, with things happening like debts being canceled, bond servants being set free, and the shmita, which I don’t pretend to understand completely, but includes even giving the land/crops a rest for an entire year. According to the Jewish calendar, we are actually IN a shmita year, which started in September 2021 with Rosh Hashanah, and maybe it’s not a coincidence that my 7th year of deconstruction falls at such a time.
All that to say: it’s been a heck of a journey, and I have reason to believe that 2022 might be an important year for me in the process – hey, maybe I’ll even move on toward more of a reconstruction emphasis rather than deconstruction.
redefining normal
Back in spring 2020, some had the idea that life was gonna be weird for a few weeks and then this whole pandemic thing would blow itself out and we’d return to normal. Here we are nearly two years later, and I’m not the only one dealing with exhaustion, fatigue, PTSD, and anxiety related to this slow-rolling live trauma event.
We’re not going back to “normal,” if there ever even was such a thing. We are changed – the effects of all that has transpired are etched upon us and have recontextualized a whole lot of things. I said to a coworker recently that we’re all missing our “old jobs” because we’ve been functioning as disaster management specialists for nearly two years now.
I begin to have a small hope that while the pandemic insanity is winding up to get louder in the immediate future, this might finally be the year that it eventually starts to peter out. Unless current me is rewriting history unconsciously, which is always a possibility, I held no such delusions that the end of the pandemic was happening in any part of 2020 or 2021.
So I bought a refill for the guts of my planner for 2022, after the planner had been shelved since March 2020 as an Utterly Irrelevant Item – who makes plans when a virus is dictating terms on a day to day basis? I have begun writing in things that won’t change, like birthdays, and things that hopefully won’t change, like vacation and other days off.
In pre-pandemic years, my planner was crammed full with tiny handwriting so all the things could fit in. So far there is still a lot of white space in the 2022 planner, and I have some ideas about things I’d love to start putting in there, but I don’t have the luxury in my life of discounting what voice the pandemic still might have in dictating next steps for the near future. So I’m some funky combination of cautious optimism, stirring ambition, and flinching and twitching as I try to be ready to roll with whatever actually comes next.
the good ol’ homestead
Still, I don’t hesitate to write down the ambitions on the “homestead” front.
- In my mind is a well-defined plan to build a “penthouse suite” within the Chicken Palace. If not for my knee difficulties, I’d have gotten it done this fall. City codes require a permit for raising chickens where we live, and the number of chickens allowed is determined by the square feet of enclosed sleeping space provided. This means right now, we can’t raise more than our 5 chickens, and honestly, 5 is enough for us. But livestock sustainability requires thinking ahead, and when I get the penthouse suite built, we’ll have enough sleeping space to allow us to consider more chicks (maybe in 2023) so that as the first batch age, others will step up. After all, while the chickens are largely just a fun pet project that gives us joy, we DO love the eggs…and my ongoing concern that democracy looks poised to fail here means I’m all about maintaining a reliable protein source that doesn’t depend on the local grocery store.
- Our front yard will be filled with plants this summer. I will add fruit bushes, fruit vines, fruit trees. We don’t need grass to mow, we just need space to walk between the plants, and I intend to push us forward hard on that this year.
- I will keep advancing on the back yard too. I have a plan to reconfigure one of the 10×10 raised beds to make it deeper but also more workable (though I’m aiming to plant earlier than usual this year, so the reworking might be a fall project, rather than a spring one). I want to bring in more perennials that are good for the bees and butterflies. And I really, really want to finally get the lean-to porch added to the garage, but we’ll see…that project has been daunting for years now. I’m also thinking about a bat shelter for the back exterior of the garage, since bats are a good thing to have around for insect control, even though I lose my mind when they get into our house (which thankfully hasn’t happened for several years now). And this year I want to erect a crow feeding station, since crows keep the hawks and foxes away from your chickens…if only I can find a place to put it that works, in our tiny little yard.
body stuff
As I do the work to rehabilitate after having both knees replaced, attention to the condition of this body is at the forefront. My legs won’t get stronger and better without faithful hard work. My hope is to never need another knee replacement again; I can’t count myself as working toward that hope if I don’t get some weight off. The plan for that is intermittent fasting (which is easy for me, and anything that’s not easy is just not going to happen, I’ve come to acknowledge) and reasonable, regular exercise. I won a FitBit at the holiday party at work recently, so I have a great tool for tracking, reminding, etc.
clean basement
When we moved into this house, just like every other move in my life, there were extra boxes that I just didn’t know what to do with, so they got tossed in an unlovely pile in the basement. That was in 2016 and I’ve meant ever since then to do a real organization and cleanout of the basement, but it never happens. Writing it down now to help pull myself into making a realistic plan and working it out.
avoiding overcrowding
Before the pandemic I was years into being maxed out, often meeting myself coming and going, and longing for a different pace on many fronts. A gift of the pandemic has been how it forced me to simplify. It is NOT my intention to pile myself back up to a state of overwhelm whenever we finally get to stop disaster management mode. Whatever is “afterward,” it ain’t gonna match what came before.
signing off
That’s what I’ve got for now, folks. Not a terrible forward look, considering how much less prep I did for this one than the last several years or more. While I notably did not make a “write more” goal, if you know me, you know it is unspoken on the list too.
I’m always interested to hear what YOU are anticipating/planning as well!