Beloved

On Saturday, after a successful but exhausting week (which included a last-minute Skype interview and solo-parenting through one church service and three overnights) I was all Giving-Tree-ed out.* So I decided to take the afternoon off. And by afternoon, I mean a just little over two hours, mostly during B’s nap.

I still felt guilty, even while defiantly telling myself I had earned a little break. After all, the last time I was entirely child-free was during the two hours I was presenting at a panel at Kalamazoo, back in May. I spent most of this break shopping for new clothes, which is about the most stressful indulgence I can subject myself to, because while I get to pick out new clothes (yay!), I spend most of the time wandering through racks of trendy clothing in despair, so overwhelmed by choices that I no longer even know what I like and feeling irrationally horrible about spending money on myself, even for clothing that actually fits and isn’t threadbare, especially since the only time people expect me to be in public wearing anything nicer than pajamas is once a week for a couple hours at church. This task, clothes shopping, is difficult by myself, but absolutely impossible with the kids.

However, after finally finding some decent clothing, including a couple of pairs of pants that fit, were comfy, and looked cute (this took over an hour—it would have taken much longer but I had limited myself to the one store that I had a coupon for), I drove to the library.

While it took me almost an hour and a half to find five articles of clothing, it only took me about five minutes to find five books. After I grabbed three in a row, I decided it was time to go home before I cleaned out the religion section.

That evening I started reading the thinnest of my five books—Henri J.M. Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, and tripped and fell right into this paragraph:

“[T]hough the experience of being the Beloved has never been completely absent from my life, I never claimed it as my core truth. I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. It was as if I kept refusing to hear the voice that speaks from the very depth of my being and says: ‘You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.’ That voice has always been there, but it seems that I was much more eager to listen to other, louder voices saying: ‘Prove that you are worth something; do something relevant, spectacular, or powerful, and then you will earn the love you so desire.’ Meanwhile, the soft, gentle voice that speaks in the silence and solitude of my heart remained unheard or, at least, unconvincing” (33).

Last time I wrote here, I wrote about failure. In the month since I posted that, I’ve had some tiny successes here and there since then (positive but noncommittal responses to a freelance job application and essay submission, and if anything comes of them, I’ll let you know) but overall I still feel like I’m in a holding pattern, waiting for something that will validate all these applications and submissions and make me feel like I have somehow earned the right to go do something fun for an afternoon and to wear new clothes.

I know intellectually that I am valuable no matter what I achieve, or don’t achieve, but the longer I go without achieving any of the accomplishments that I have spent the past eight years using to determine my value** the harder it is for me to believe that.

Last week in the lectionary reading we heard the story of the Israelites’ daily manna, and the guest preacher discussed the necessity of finding manna from God to get us through one day at a time—little things, like paragraphs we stumble across in books, for instance. (There was more to the sermon than that, but as I mentioned above, I was solo-parenting in the pew and missed most of it). I’m holding on to that paragraph today, and to the little book that leaped off the shelf into my hand Saturday afternoon. I don't feel like the Beloved, but I still am anyway.

Dear Reader, we have infinite value, and we are Beloved. Always. 

*I hate The Giving Tree so much. That’s another post, though.

**“Value” in this case narrowly defined as success in my particular program, of course, but you spend that many years defining yourself by a single set of standards and it almost can’t help but bleed over into the rest of your identity, even in spite of my conscious efforts to avoid that very thing.