Conjunction Junction

Please tell me that I am not so old that I’m the only one who remembers Schoolhouse Rock? I LOVED Schoolhouse Rock videos and they’re actually pretty informative. Don’t believe me? Google the Schoolhouse Rock video on how a bill becomes a law – I guarantee you’ll learn something new. My favorite video was Conjunction Junction. Maybe it’s because my mom was a teacher, but I’m a closet grammar snob and a sucker for a six-dollar word. A song about the functions of language is pretty much my ideal jam. The line I still sing from time to time says, “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function/Hookin’ up words and phrases and clauses/Conjunction Junction, what’s your function/If, and, but, or, nor”. (And yes, I know that I just used an Oxford comma. It’s a thing now, mmkay?) I have come back to this song over and over in the last week and a half as I’ve been struggling to articulate my feelings on the place that I’m in right now.

I tend to think of a life as one really long year with lots of different seasons. My younger life started in the Season of If. If I wasn’t a straight A student, I’d failed. If I wasn’t thin, I was never going to be attractive enough to be happy. If I was honest with people about the mistakes I’d made, they wouldn’t want to be a part of my life any longer. IF. The Season of If is based in fear and predicated upon the idea that any good thing must be both earned and deserved. If believes that, at my core, I am not enough. It’s not a particularly healthy place to be in, emotionally speaking. If turns us into insecure, grasping people who seek validation in any form possible.

Luckily, and through plenty of time with a good therapist, the Season of If did not last forever. But when I was able to see my choices for what they were, I made a wide pendulum swing to the opposite side of things and entered the Season of Also. Having spent so many years believing that I was unworthy of anything good, Also was the polar opposite – not only did I want that, but ALSO this. Not only was I learning how to be comfortable with myself, I was also sharing that person without good boundaries or solid judgement on with whom I was sharing. Also doesn’t stop long enough to ask pertinent questions, has very little self-control and tends to be almost Pollyanna-esque in it’s naivete. Also may not be as self-depreciative as If, but in the end both seasons accomplish roughly the same thing. At the end of the day, the Season of Also is again looking for validation by piling on allllllll the things and hoping that you hit pay dirt somewhere in the middle of the pile. I think most of our country spends the majority of their lives in the dead center of the Season of Also.

And then my babies came along – by which I mean Pook and Boogie – and our life dramatically, immediately, excruciatingly downshifted into the Season of Or. Things were completely upside down and every choice was painfully anxious and terrifying. Every choice was either scary OR scarier. I could spend the night awake in the NICU with my babies or I could sleep at home and fear that they’d die without me in the room. I could keep the job that made me feel wholly alive and confident or I could quit and make sure that Pook stayed alive. I could pay the power bill or the water bill. Everything was different and I was awash in anxiety. Overall, I think the Season of Or teaches us all about self control and patience and healthy ways of dealing with stress. Those are all truly fantastic lessons to learn, but also fantastically difficult. These are lessons that change who we are at the deepest level and force us to face some pretty unattractive truths about ourselves. And yet the truth is that change doesn’t happen until circumstances get so uncomfortable that we have the motivation to do so. The deepest, strongest roots grow in seasons of drought, where the tree is so desperate to feed and nourish itself that it digs in further than ever before to find the hidden water. The Season of Or sucks – there’s really no other way to put it – but it’s also the season that’s going to transform you into who you are called to be.

So when Melissa lost her job about two weeks ago, I at first thought this was another step further into Or. And my normal reaction to these moments is utter panic, tears, despair. I called my mom and had a good five minutes of, “What are we gonna do?!?” before hanging up. I sat there in my quiet room and instead of crying my face off decided to pause and sit, just breathing and calming my insides. (If we don ‘t know each other personally, you don’t know how very much this goes against my grain, so you’ll have to trust me: this is not a typical Sarah reaction.) I began to pray – to actually have a conversation with God instead of just frantically babbling and begging. I sat and I listened. I waited. I didn’t know it at the time, but that silence, that listening and waiting was really just the first tentative toe-dip into the Season of And.

And so we walk. We pray and we trust and we believe that all things come together for God’s true and beautiful purposes. I could list for you all of the things that God has done in the last ten days, but I know you’d not believe them – I can hardly believe them myself. There has been something crazy wonderful happening literally every day AND they aren’t the things I’d pick myself were I in charge of designing the plan. My plan would be for Melissa to have already found a new job, for life to settle into something like normalcy for a bit… This is clearly NOT God’s plan. The Season of And is no less scary to me, the control freak who enters each day armed with lists and calendars, but there is a certain freedom that comes with the surety that I can do absolutely nothing about this situation but remain where God has called me to be. My job is to have faith, to show my children all of the amazing ways we continue to be showered with love and protected by Jesus, and to share with all of you the things that He has pressed into the wet clay of my soul. And to start each day with that same silence, that same listening, that same waiting.

May we find the courage to sit upon His lap and simply wait for His mercies to rain down. May we still our hearts long enough to realize that we are precisely who He created us to be and that fact alone ensures that WE. ARE. ENOUGH. May we learn the lessons we need to face down the deepest demons within. May the Season of And seep into our very bones as we realize just how deeply we are loved.