Author: Tarrah Vaupel

Stronger Together

/ Tarrah Vaupel / Leave a comment

Does this photo resonate with anyone? It does for me. This photo accompanied one of my social media posts from FIVE years ago…and it conveniently popped up today as a “memory”.

I wish I could say that it was “just” a memory…and that I never have feelings like this anymore…but that wouldn’t be true at…all… The truth is, we have all been conditioned by society and our culture to ‘push through’ and ‘push it down’…but what happens when we do that? What is the price that we pay at the end of the day for doing this with no regard or space for actually listening to and honoring ourselves? It’s costly… It’s exhausting… It’s abusive… It’s toxic… …and you will burnout…

There are times in all of our lives when we are faced with times that we simply must move forward and press on with every last ounce of strength that we have. That’s life. Happens to everyone and NO ONE is immune to times such as these. Even the person or people in your lives who seemingly “have it all together” or seem to draw from a limitless amount of energy and enthusiasm…them too.

I have learned, and am still learning, that sometimes we just need to surrender to that exhaustion. If only for a moment or two…allow yourself a moment to speak to yourself with words of compassion and love. Feel your ‘feels’, sense what your body is telling you…sit your butt still and just be. It is within those moments where God breaks in and feels with you…with all of us. IF we allow space for that to happen, of course. To be sure, God is with us through each moment of our lives. BUT when we surrender ourselves to the reality of our bodies and take a moment to “just be” in a moment of contemplation or meditation…be it sitting in our cars, in a specially created space of solitude for reflection OR locking ourselves in the bathroom for 5 minutes to “get away from it all” #thestruggleisreal. Those are the moments that we can hear and feel the tangible love, grace and strength of God alongside us. Staring back at us, and sometimes, through our own eyes in the mirror.

Our exhaustion, our brokenness, our imperfections, our cracks are places where the light enters…and those spaces make me, for example, stronger with being aware and fully present in knowing that God is with me through it and in the mess ’til the end. This “hotmess” (as I sometimes refer to myself) is stronger with God and most assuredly stronger together with all of you. Remember that YOU, dear reader, are a part of that “togetherness”…and I thank God for that.

Hello darkness…my old friend…

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“Headed I fear, for a most dreadful place. The Waiting Place.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come,
or a plane to go or the mail to come,
or the rain to go or the phone to ring,
or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night

or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.

Everyone is just waiting.” ~ ‘Oh the Places You’ll Go’ Excerpt by Dr. Seuss

Welp…here I am again. In a most dreadful place…the waiting place. This time its different though and I have a whole week or more to flesh that out. This I have discerned so far: I intentionally find myself (ever so slowly) raising my head, straightening my shoulders and walking head-on into the place that I have cowered in, trembled through or hidden within so many times before. Why this difference I sense this time? I am held in a new and different way by the village that surrounds and upholds me. I was reminded by beloved friends to “Remember”… Remember that I have been here in this Godforsaken waiting place before, affirmed my feelings and held space for me. Remember that I am held, I am loved and I am not alone through this valley. God is with me…enfolding me in a loving embrace and inviting me to trust that “all shall be well” and that God is gonna walk with me through this time in the valley and never leave my side for a single breath. Remember that I cannot and am not doing this alone…leaning hard into my faith to strengthen me and reflecting upon the journey of things I have already overcome. It’s incredibly humbling to look back over my journey in and out of the wilderness and through the vastness of my valleys and mountaintop moments. It’s humbling, and yet, so empowering all at the same time.

The words from my Lenten devotional by Rachel A. Keefe continue to be timely and offer words that land on my heart:

“Death retreats into the shadows

as I emerge out of the ruins

You spoke a word and life was restored

to a beloved daughter

and an outcast woman

I am somewhere in between

and in need of a Word

find me here

my hands are open.”

The words that I sing from my soul during worship:

“Meet me in my wandering…deep within my soul.”

I wonder not that you will find me because I am already found. I wonder not that you will meet me because you are already with me…pursuing me with a reckless love and steadfast promise to always uphold me with a mighty hand and grace overflowing.

I wonder who else finds themselves in this place today? I wonder if these words will reach them and bring comfort…

Stormy weather

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Sea glass is quite beautiful, isn’t it? If it is genuine sea glass we can find it washed up on beaches around the world. It exists in a spectrum of colors…some more readily obtainable than others, of course…but still any color found in its natural state amidst the rock and sand on a coast line is considered a treasure by the hundreds of thousands of sea glass “treasure hunters” that seek and gather-up the unique articles thrust from our seas and oceans.

Typically, the greatest “crop” of sea glass is found after storms; when the waves stir up the bits and pieces from the sandy and rocky bottoms of the ocean. The tumultuous tossing and turning of their watery home…uproots their resting places. As they are turned upside down and tumble through the sandy, salty water…some are dragged across the rocky or sandy depths…unseen by human eyes and likely unnoticed by the sea life that endures the storm alongside.

Here’s the thing about sea glass that I find the most fascinating…it was once a part of a whole “thing” that was broken. It could be a bottle, a jug, a jar, a glass, etc…it was a container for something. It had a purpose, a use. It may have been carefully and lovingly crafted by hand to hold the most exquisite perfume or oil. It may have held the wine or champagne used at a wedding celebration…or to christen a new sea vessel…to celebrate the birth of a child or a financial merger. It may have held holy water…human blood for transfusion…water to quench a wanderers thirst after a long period in the wilderness. The wonderings of the initial uses of these vessels far exceeds my capability to capture them all and include them in this writing. But again, they were once whole and they were broken. Broken, shattered and tossed away. Some may have even been broken during the storm while in the sea…crashing it into a rocky outcrop or cliff bottom. Nonetheless, sea glass is something that begins from brokenness and then begins its transformation into the beautiful, sought after, pieces of glass. I found this to be very insightful and relative to our fragile human condition.

It is within this human condition that I situate myself in reflecting on my Lenten devotional for this day. My wonderings about the differences in the ways that we handle sea glass are in stark opposition to the way in which we see and hold each other when weathering a storm or after a season of storms is thrust upon our lives. Not only that though…but the differences within ourselves and our own brokenness and storms that we endure and weather.

I wonder…what if we searched for each other like we did for sea glass? Valuing and admiring it’s beauty that is a direct result of its transformation and stormy journey?

What if we allowed ourselves to be seen in our raw condition as we endure our storms? What it we allow ourselves to be discovered after our weathering in our wilderness places where we are found? Unmasked and in the open…not hiding or masking ourselves in the artificial, plastic faces and expressions that we typically greet each other with. What if we greeted each other like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son…running out to greet us as he sees us timidly journeying up the path home? What if we journeyed away from the herd as Jesus often did…searching for the lost one to bring back into the fold of the 99 still gathered together? What if we actively searched for each other like the “treasure hunters” combing the beaches for the tiniest glimmer buried in the rocks and sand? What if we spent time considering the journey instead of just the outcome as we held each other?

It is capital T Truth that the most growth and transformative times in our lives come from the storms that we weather and the valleys that we are pushed into. Those are the times where our narratives change and our perspectives, beliefs, values and faith are rocked and tempered into new ways of making meaning of our lives. Would having a loving, supportive companion alongside us in the journey make a difference? Reminding us of the treasure that we already are within our brokenness instead us pushing us forward to envision the lessons that we will one day glean from this season?

One thing that I know with 110% certainty…is that God is with us within our moments of being broken and with our moments of transformation and weathering of our storms of life. God isn’t the cause of these things, of course…and God is also there with us when the storm passes and joy breaks forth in the sunbeams that pierce through the dark skies looming above us and fooling us into believing that the storm will never pass. Same way with the shadows that envelop us in the valleys we journey through and climb our way out of as the sun breaks across the mountaintop behind us…bringing warmth to our bodies and light to our path. And…most true of all…is that God loves us before our brokenness, loves us in our moments of breaking and bending, and loves us through our storm and transformation into the new form that we become. And isn’t that amazing?!?!! You, beloved reader, are loved beyond measure, are held and treasured, and are worthy of being found and cared for.

Bending and Breaking…

/ Tarrah Vaupel / 2 Comments

My Lenten devotional this day brought me to a scripture from Luke where Jesus heals the woman who had been “crippled for 18 years by a spirit.” My ableist alarm immediately began tripping and I read the scripture and then the commentary that followed. The story goes, that Jesus spotted this woman in the crowd and then called her to him…he makes a proclamation that she is “healed from her ailment” and then she stand upright and praises God. As the priests always do when Jesus heals, they become infuriated and chastise him for working on the sabbath day. This leads to Jesus calling the priests out for their hypocrisy and the crowd rejoices at the great work that Jesus has done.

What do we know of this woman? This human creature that was standing in the crowd that day. The gospel writer creates her narrative for us…but I wonder and find myself wanting to know more about her.

I imagine a woman during those biblical times. IF I give any creedance at all to the narrative that the gospel writer painted, then I discern that she was an unwed woman. The writer says that a “spirit” had caused her to not be able to stand straight. Interesting thought here…could that “spirit” simply be the heaviness of the weight she was carrying by being unwed in a time where women were only worth something because they were married to a man? Could that heaviness be that she had lost her husband eighteen years ago, he had no family or brothers to care for her (as was the custom) so she was forced to fend for herself in the wilderness to survive? Could that heaviness had been that she was unable to bear children (yet another value attribution in that time for women) and he husband divorced her? Perhaps she was born with the inability to stand straight…which meant (once again in “those” times) that her or her family had done something that God was punishing her for…excuse me while I vomit at the atrocity of this way of thinking. I don’t have answers to any of these wonderings…but I think that this woman is worth more than what the gospel writer used her for. We shouldn’t overlook her and only see the mystery of this healing that Jesus thrust upon her. She was used as an illustration of Jesus’ power to work miracles….inspiration porn, if you will. All too often in our own society we bear witness to similar stories of people overcoming things thought to be impossible…and in the midst of all of that, we lose sight of the person’s humanity. This woman deserves more than that couple of sentences written about her in the bible…she doesn’t even have a name. I imagine a name for her…a name for her that I believe fits into the way that Jesus saw her and interacted with her…a Hebrew name for ‘precious’: Yakira.

Indeed, Yakira was a precious child of God. I imagine her story to be one of isolation and one where she wasn’t shown any kindness or love from others. The weight of life weighed her down…causing her to bend a bit more with each passing day. Yakira would bend, but she would not break under the weight of the harshness of her life story. She wanders into the synagogue, or perhaps just peers inside from the doorway at the commotion that Jesus has brought around him at his teaching and presence. And Jesus sees her. He calls out to her and call her by her name, “Yakira, come to me.” She nervously make her way to him as the crowd parts to make her path clear to Jesus. Jesus does something here that no one has likely done…in eighteen years of more of her earthly life…Jesus touches her. He touches her with love, kindness and compassion. Human and Divine…placing hands upon her and loving her as no other she had ever experienced. Jesus touching her was, in my interpretation, more important than any words of “victory over her” that were proclaimed. Yakira’s own spirit, to be sure, sought love, kindness and connection. To be seen, to be valued, to be held as the precious child of God that she indeed was. Her spirit is lifted, her weight she no longer carries because of the love he has shown her…and she raises her head and body which is now free from its weight. Yakira rises and praises God.

Jesus broke tradition here…and we too are called to break tradition in seeking justice for others and, to be sure, for ourselves. We face many things in life that weigh us down and wear on our souls. Bending…breaking…pushing us down. Life tears at us and leaves us dangling, threadbare…clinging to whatever bit of hope we can grasp at in our times of wilderness and darkness. It is, however, within those times that we are better able to hear that still small voice of God…it can come as a whisper from some place deep within us…or perhaps, from a kind word or crinkled eyes peeking over a masked face. When someone SEES us…calls to us and speaks a life-giving word to us. THAT is a miracle we are all capable of and THAT is something that we should all embody towards others as beloved children of God. I wonder how much more life-giving this biblical narrative could be had this woman been given more humanity? I wonder often about those left unnamed and used to make a point. These wonderings are important and can bring much more commonality between our lives in this time next to those lives that walked upon this earth more than 2000 years ago. Will you wonder with me? What do you wonder about this beloved woman, Yakira?

Stardust, dirt and ashes…

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From stardust we are born and to stardust we shall return.

I simply LOVE this imagery. My colleague, Rev. Stacy Tate, at Friedens UCC in Irvington, IL placed this imagery into my heart when we were preparing for Ash Wednesday worship. It is incredibly true. At our most fundamental, we are all made up of the same element that exists throughout the cosmos. When wondering and searching for the “where did we come from”…it seems to me that we came from the same place that everything came…in it’s most elemental form…a building block of our humanness that can be found in every part of the created. All “living” things on this created earth are composed of these four elements (and more of course): hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. At our core we are made up of the same pieces of the air that we breathe, the water that we drink and the ground that we stand upon. These same elements also form the stars, the planets, and the spaces between all of them and all of us. Cool, right? I think so.

Then I wonder…if we are so fundamentally connected, why do we often times feel so isolated and alone? I wonder if our disconnectedness in a world that is more technologically connected than ever before in history is actually a result of our technological advancements? I wonder if our connectedness is based more squarely on the simplicity of our five basic human senses interacting with the created world we live within?

And all of these wonderings linger in my thoughts as I think about Ash Wednesday reflectively. From stardust we are born and to stardust we shall return… Ashes to ashes, dust to dust… It seems to me that our existence and the existence of the cosmos is no “accident” or something that simply always has been. For me, everything had to come from somewhere…even when considering the “big bang” that thrust the earth into its existence came from something that was already in place in the cosmos. In my faith and my belief, I hold firmly to the idea that God, the Divine creator, the architect of life and the cosmos…spoke everything into being. With just a word, an idea, a whimsical thought or wondering…everything was flung into it’s existence. Can you EVEN imagine…

We too, are spoken into being. We are called and named as beloved children of God. In thinking about that as we begin this Lenten journey…I wonder how this spiritual journey will unfold for me throughout Lent? I wonder if I will have the discipline to take the intentional time to listen, be still and wrestle with what the day has presented to me and sometimes thrusts in my path to overcome? A quote from theologian Rachael A. Keefe from her book, “Negotiating the Shadows”, “If Lent is a spiritual journey, then the road should be treacherous and the light of Easter not always visible. We ought to arrive at Good Friday worn out from wrestling our own demons and ready to offer up all the things which hold us captive to make room for the new life of Easter morning.” Keefe goes further in addressing Ash Wednesday and the Lenten journey in a dialogue she presents between, who I believe, herself and the Divine, “You’ll go where you need to go. It’s your journey. But you said, ‘desert, wilderness and darkness. Yes, You’ve been to these places before; I’ve seen you there. But you’re telling me I need to go again–to the chaos and the brokenness and the painful places. It will be different this time. You go with intention. Look for the stillness in the chaos, the healing in the brokenness, and for the hope in the pain. I will be there.”

And so I enter with intention into this season of Lent. I enter with the knowledge that I am created and named by God and I am made up of the same elements of that within the whole of the created cosmos. I enter, humbly, into the spaces of brokenness, chaos and unknowning-ness. I enter into this journey…wondering how it shall unfold and knowing that I will journey where I need to go. I wonder how the Holy will reveal itself to me and within myself? I wonder how others will journey through this season alongside me? I wonder if my seeking the Divine in the midst of the sacred silence and chaos of life will be heard and received by me…even if it’s not what I want to hear and feel. I wonder…will I have the courage? Will I have the grit and the strength for the wrestling? I wonder…within my living between my stardust beginning and my stardust returning…how will my turning and facing the Divine alongside me and within myself deepen my faith?