Eating Mangoes while Naked.

*Note: This was written in the Spring. God was revealing my loneliness but has continued to bless me with friendships that are providing a place for me to be more "naked". I'm super grateful for these friends.*

I sat down over a cutting board full of almost rotten mangoes with a friend the other night, I felt the Spirit move my heart to talk about a strange feeling I had experienced earlier in the day. While I peeled back the much too soft skin on my mangoes, I explained feeling like I would jump out of my own soft skin. Recently, I've been experiencing these rushes of anxiety; there's an energy within my body that must get out. I need a release of this pressure-like feeling building up in my mind, body and soul.

An invitation given by my friend's poignant question, "What in your life might be contributing to this feeling?" prompted my soul to begin bearing itself, revealing deep feelings of loneliness and struggles with sin. I am always astonished, no matter how many times it happens, how the right question can trigger soul bearing, especially if we have begun to trust the person sitting across the cutting board of mangoes. This "practice of emotional nakedness" is a practice I haven't done in my new community very often or very well. I think of that scene in The Proposal where the two run into each other completely naked unintentionally and the guy keeps saying "So naked... just so naked." hah! Though that's a funny scene, that's what it feels like, just SO NAKED.

I almost shocked myself with admitting that I have felt lonely here. In the most practical sense, I am usually not lonely, or rather shall I say, usually not alone. I have an incredible community of brothers and sisters who are always getting together, sharing their gifts of hospitality, and meeting over cups of hot coffee or St. Louis brewed beer. I typically have some grasp about what is going on in my heart and mind...at least some glimpse of the tip of the iceberg of why I may be experiencing a certain emotion. (A brilliant but exhausting gift of insight/discernment that God bestowed upon me.) Yet, recently, with these surges of anxiety, I have felt as clueless as the nautical minds steering the Titanic full speed into the iceberg they couldn't even see. I needed a friend to help me discern --"clean up of Pride on isle 4 please".

As I mutilated the mango infront of me with our largest kitchen knife (my body's way of dealing with the stress I feel when revealing my inner hurt), I was vulnerable in sharing with my friend these feelings of loneliness and recent tendencies to want more and more wine, addictive exercise, and have even felt like I might be beginning to understand the feelings behind why practices like cutting seem appealing. It just feels like there is something inside of me that wants to get out. As we talked, sharing similar testimonies, feelings, and honest answers to hard questions,  we began to weave our thoughts into a tapestry that we could begin to step back from and begin to understand a broader picture of what may be going on in me.

Last August I left behind an environment in which I felt deeply known. Space and time has separated me from those friendships in which I feel fully myself at all times as seasons of transition have many times before. My tendency is to think that because I have people in my life, though they don't live near me in distance , I can live within a new community without needing those deep friendships in which people know the places I feel the most shame, the stories of my past, and the nooks and crannies of my deepest passions.  As I kept verbally throwing up my mind over the mangoes, I realized that I only feel comfortably known by someone when I begin to allow them to see both my shame and my silly. As I finished up my sharing of deep insecurities and places of shame with my friend, something triggered me to use a funny voice and act out a scene from a movie with a piece of mango skin, causing my two roommates in the kitchen to bust out laughing. I felt even more vulnerable and naked, but known at the same time.

What baffled me most, is why didn't I see this iceberg called lonliness before it was ripping a hole, threatening to sink the vessel. I think I didn't recognize it because I had a false sense of being known.

For the last ten months I have lived in a community that understands the need for people to have their stories known. My hospitable  community here at seminary is a buzz with the questions of "How are you doing?", which is typically answered by a "Pretty good.", and combated with a "Really?, How are you really?" There is great dignity in this converse between friends who are learning that to shed light on our struggle, hurts, and deep shame is both healing and redeeming. There is a sense of freedom created by sharing our struggles even in our "surface level" conversations. Typically, below our surface we are indeed "wrestling", and to not have this known creates a sense of not feeling known all together by those around us. And friends, we were created to be DEEPLY KNOWN WITHOUT SHAME.

In this moment I realized the significance of this conversation between friends, and the hard work that it takes to experience it. It's not a surface level interaction. It is a conversation that required so much vulnerability - whether it be vulnerability by sharing shame or vulnerability in being silly, but a conversation, none the less, that drips with beauty - something of our Garden Origins.

So there are two things I learned from this:

 1. What is at risk in a community like my present community is that our brief interactions of sharing "struggle-bus feelings and thoughts" may become a mask in which we avoid the deep interactions with a few close friends. This avoidance I believe to be highly unintentional. I myself began to believe that I was living with small interactions of deep honesty spread through out my day, believing that this somehow would result in being known. I still believe the way in which our interactions are at least providing room to answer with something other than "Great. And, you?" is a good thing. I just am hyper aware now of it's tendency to become the new "surface"-- a surface level interaction that may be even more detrimental to us having intimate conversations which are the essential ingredient of feeling known. The danger is to lose the deep sacredness of sharing and to be caught up in the false sense of feeling known and thinking we know others. I must iterate here that I am deeply thankful for every, "Really? How are you really?" that has presented itself as a challenge to my tendency to hide behind the answer, "Good." And I want to acknowledge here that most of this problem of not being known does not lie within friends ability/inability to ask the right "How are you doing questions." Rather it lies within my willingness to be vulnerable. Which brings me to the second thing I learned:

2. What kept me from feeling known which in turn perpetuated my loneliness was the dragon within myself called self-protection. An all familiar foe. I'm afraid to risk.To be known, you have to begin to be vulnerable and be willing to risk.  In one of my seminary classes this year my professor Dr. Zink said brilliantly, "Our sense of being alive is rooted in connection." I think the thing inside me trying to get out during those intense feelings of anxiety was me.  I needed to feel alive, to feel like I had a pulse - and typically what makes my pulse most strong is intimacy with God and others. I want to deeply laugh, and for goodness sake I want to be spastic, silly and child-like in my relationships here. Yet, for me to do that I have to risk. We live in a broken world, we must accept our vulnerability will be taken advantage of at times, sometimes we will face judgment from others, our silliness will be squelched by those "more mature" (What ever the hell that maturity is.)...we simply, will not always be loved and cared for well. Unfortunately, I have to fight against an "all or nothing" way of thinking ... for the rest of my life. Sometimes the ways in which I've been "squelched" or others have literally run away from my vulnerability, makes me close up and not enter into new relationships of nakedness. And that, friends, is what leads to loneliness. We weren't created for the clothing of self-protection, control, and intimacy-avoidance. We were created NAKED; and to be that in a fallen world is a risky business. The risk is worth it, but in order to take it we have to bathe ourselves in prayer and live daily trusting God to provide. Sometimes I have to remind myself that God made clothing for Adam and Eve when they felt naked and ashamed. Thankfully I still have clothing today, but what's greater is I have the clothing of Christ; we put on Christ and are clothed by his righteousness. Because of that WE WILL BE OKAY when we are vulnerable, naked, and yet not cared for well by others. This helps us take the risk.