Anne Marie Miller

On July 3, 2012, eight days before my friend Jay Williams turned 32 years old, he was buried in Lebanon Cemetery in Plains, Georgia. The air was still and thick with southern humidity, and sweat collected in the small of my back under the layers of my black dress. My friends and I stood on the brittle grass of the cemetery, waiting in line to say goodbye to Jay one last time. We dodged the sun by shuffling in and out of each other’s shadows and swatted at clouds of gnats with paper fans provided by the local funeral home.

In the summer of 2010, Jay, myself, and 15 other people rode our bicycles from San Diego to Myrtle Beach, raising money and awareness for an organization that empowers people to fight the HIV/AIDS and water crises in Africa. Jay was the first cyclist to arrive at the church that would send us off. As I pulled into the church parking lot in San Diego, I saw a short, skinny guy with a tan wearing a straw cowboy hat riding his red bicycle in circles. Was he one of the team cyclists? Or some vagabond traveler who perhaps illegally acquired a nice road bike? Was he drunk? He looked so happy—too happy.

Quickly, we learned he was one of our teammates. While the rest of us worried if our gear would hold up or how we’d survive cycling nine hours a day in 110-degree weather, Jay was content to cycle the 3000 miles we traveled cross-country in Teva sandals, occasionally strapping a milk jug of water to the back of his bike so he wouldn’t have to stop. Even without clipping into pedals or using recovery drinks (he preferred chocolate milk), Jay was the strongest on our team. He wasn’t competitive, though; he’d stop and help someone change out a blown tube or, in his South Georgia accent, would cheer up a teammate having an unpleasant day.

As we got to know Jay, we learned he was in a skiing accident when he was a teenager. After extensive surgery that caused his abdominal muscles to be separated and required him to lose a kidney, he was back on the slopes the next winter. Considering the doctors told him he’d be lucky to walk again, this was only one small miracle in Jay’s life. Jay was brave. Jay was humble. It seemed like Jay was invincible. He quickly and quietly became everybody’s unlikely hero.

After the tour ended, each cyclist returned to his or her respective hometown. Jay made an effort to stay in touch with each of us, scattered as we were.

After tornadoes ripped through the south in spring 2011, I volunteered at a benefit concert in Birmingham, Alabama. Jay drove four hours from Plains, Georgia, to help me sell T-shirts for two hours. Then he drove four hours back so he could be at his job on time the next morning. This wasn’t atypical. This was Jay. By day, he worked in his father’s peanut factory and by night, secretly repaired friends’ houses when they were on vacation. He loved Jesus, and to everyone who knew him, he never had to say a word to prove it. His actions proved this love beyond any shadow of doubt.

On June 29, 2012, when the team received the news that Jay fell two stories and was fighting for his life, none of us could believe it. Twenty-four hours later, Jay passed away due to the trauma caused by his fall.

Sadly, Jay was not the first of my friends to pass last year. Two others have unexpectedly died: one in a tragic hiking accident in Japan and another after an arduous battle with cancer. I began to wonder if, as a 33-year-old, death simply becomes a more frequent notification or if last year has been an anomaly. Thinking on these things, my chest tightens and my breathing becomes shallow and quick. I’m faced with the reality of my own transience now; death has been speaking into my consciousness more repeatedly than usual.

Most of the cycling team was able to make it to Georgia for Jay’s funeral. We stayed in two guest homes on a farm in the tiny town of Ellaville. None of us knew the family who owned the farm before we arrived. They heard we were coming, and they opened their doors. They loved Jay, and they loved Jesus, and because of this, they loved us.

Alone in one of the houses while waiting for our ride to the visitation, I sat in the living room with the book I was reading. After attempting to understand the same sentence four times, I gave up and stared off into the smoke-stained fireplace in front of me, listening to the sounds that filled the house: water dripping from the kitchen faucet, songs of crickets and the rustle of leaves as squirrels jumped around in the heavy woods. In my hasty packing, I forgot to bring a pen. I searched the cottage and found a pencil and scribbled in the back of my book:

When someone in our periphery dies, it gives our spirits pause. A moment of silence. But when someone close—a kindred spirit—passes, our reality becomes surreality. We float through a new and different kind of time and space, and our bodies feel the loss of a bright soul that no longer walks with us. The air, the sounds, the light … all is different when someone departs. When they became part of us, they implanted a small piece of their spirit in our own. And when they leave, there is such pain from the empty space that spirit used to fill. This is grief.

During the days of Jay’s visitation and funeral, grief was loud. It was in the eyes of the 200 people who lined up in the heat to say goodbye to him and console his parents and his girlfriend. It spoke into the quiet moments in conversations as we spoke of Jay’s memory. It was in the tears of his friends as they touched his casket before it was lowered.

However, as loud as grief was, joy was louder. It seems incredibly trite to write those words; it feels as cliché as saying, “He’s in a better place now” or “God just wanted one of his angels home.” But joy outsang grief, and its notes ring just as beautifully today as they did last year. Joy sings of a life lived bravely and with love. Joy sings of friendships created and renewed. Joy sings of every minute someone spent with Jay. In the moments where grief is raw and bleeding, joy reaches in with peace and hope. It is not intrusive or overpowering. It is constant and gently comforts our sorrow. In the space this mercy offered us, we could mourn and celebrate.

July 12, 2012 marks the day Jay was buried. New concerns and mundane tasks seem to lessen the time I think of his death. Distractions threaten to numb the sensitivity to life and community and love I experienced so intensely almost a year ago. It’s effortless to let death, grief, and the overwhelming joy it paradoxically brings move away from our hearts. Our culture demands we must get over it—life goes on—but with intentional determination, maybe we have an alternative choice.

Yes, we must accept life and death, just as we must accept grief and joy. There is a season for all things. But instead of moving on from the things death awakens in us, perhaps we embrace them. Perhaps we choose to keep the mark a life leaves on our heart unhealed and open and, by doing so, we create space for others to experience the legacy of love and joy a departed friend leaves behind.

Can there, in fact, be joy in holding on to grief?

(A reflection from 2011…)

Last night, after organizing and budgeting, I was packing up my mess from the den, about to head into my room to go to sleep. The family I live with came home, and it was almost as if [the wife's] maternal instinct was on high alert. She came directly up to where I was and asked how my day was. What ensued was not pretty…gobs of mucous flowed like a river. I was struggling. My pile of unexpected bills was growing, and my income is nowhere near what it used to be. More than financially, I was wrecked over the fact I am not spending as much time as I think I need to writing — simply due to the amount of hours in a day, I can’t commit the hours like I was able to in my former life.

She said something that has been stuck in a loop in the synapses in my brain…

“Do you want relief? Or do you want to be healed?”

Of course, in the moment, in the now, I want relief. I’m thankful much of the intense and acute grief of what happened last year has been recovered and that emotional pain has subsided a good bit. However, there is pain I recognize in the absence of my trusting God with everything, including the things you and I spoke of yesterday – my purpose and meaning in life.

I feel as if those things that were so secure and were running like clockwork were stripped from me and I had no control as everything was pulled into a vortex. I feel anger and envy in those places, directed at myself, at God, and sometimes toward others. There is grief in losing who I “thought” I was…which is exactly where God wants me to be – completely uncertain of myself apart from anything other than Him. I know He doesn’t intend it in a sadistic, punishing way, but in the refining way we always hear about and generally allow to fall on the trail of clichés we leave behind us like breadcrumbs – boring, plain, stale, and easily forgotten.

It’s obvious the healing process is going to be painful, but in the end, it will not only paint me more in the image of Christ, but through grace and His perfect mercy, perhaps color others whose lives with whom I may come into contact.

Looking back, I see a life that was selfish, egocentric, and insecure.

Do I want that to be my legacy? Is that what I want to pour into others? Is that what I want to reflect?

Sure, I want relief from the “pain” and “injustice” I’ve walked in the last year (those words are in quotes as they are based from my perspective), but to be healed means to be first be broken, to be reset – like a bone.

When I had my heart surgery, they had to go in and burn the broken spots. I should be praying for more of those broken spots to be burned, so my heart can be made whole. Whole doesn’t mean perfect or without evidence of pain.

Whole means whole.

Deep down, I do desire that – that wholeness, which many spiritual leaders say is brought in two ways: through prayer and through suffering. And maybe deep down, more than writing, more than advocating, more than being someone people can rely on…maybe that is my purpose. To be like Christ.

And maybe, just maybe, that is a purpose that belongs to us all.

Since beginning blogging in 2005, I shared my struggles with anxiety, depression…and then what was believed to be a mild version of Bipolar II.

Except for the anxiety, nobody could ever – with confidence - say I had depression or Bipolar II. There’s no blood test to find out; instead, I tried almost every medicine known to treat them…to no avail. After six years of trying, I was about ready to give up.

That’s when my marriage ended.

I thought the depressive symptoms I showed took me to rock bottom. That was before I met Grief.

Grief was a relentless monster taunting me to end my life. Friends intervened and I went into an inpatient counseling center in Arizona.

A little over a year ago, I found myself in the darkest time of my life. My marriage had ended. There were days I couldn’t leave my house. Days I hurt myself. Days I didn’t eat. Or sleep. Or care. I wanted to die. I saw no purpose in life.

The only thing I (barely) had strength to do was ask. I needed help, and I knew it. Because of the generosity and insight of my friends, I was able to receive intensive counseling at an inpatient facility in the southwest. Walking in, I thought it was my last chance. Nothing had pulled me out of the blackness that consumed me and the poisonous lies that poured death into my every thought. It seemed like nothing could save me. No person. No bible verse. No career achievements. No amount of money. No church. Nothing.

After a day of testing, biofeedback, brain scans, intake interviews, and full body checks to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything I could hurt myself with, I met with the psychiatrist who was in charge of my treatment. He showed me my intake test results showing I had literally maxed out the text on issues of anxiety and depression.

“How long have you been anxious?”

“Since I was in high school.”

“And depressed?”

“Probably since 2004 or 2005.”

What he said next shocked me. “Your anxiety’s well managed and I think you’re in a good spot with that,” (I agreed.) “However, you’re not depressed.”

I looked down at the test results in front of me with a graph that represented I was 105 out of 105 on their scale.

“But this says I’m pretty much as depressed as anyone could possibly be measured.”

“It’s not depression.”

I was too tired, too sad, too apathetic to argue.

“What you’ve been suffering from in the last six years, and what’s put you over the edge now is grief.” He went through a timeline of events in my life and showed me where I had not processed things I should have naturally grieved. When my marriage ended, I shut down. I gave up.

Instead of my body having a chemical imbalance, I never learned how to grieve.

So much made sense. I lost so many friends and family members but their deaths never felt like much to me. I thought I was strong. Instead, I learned I was on auto-pilot to numb any kind of loss. We traced it back to when I was sixteen and a youth pastor ten years my senior “loved” me for six months. I lost so much of myself to him that I shut down.

For me, to grieve meant to become numb.

Grief is a natural part of our response to loss, and though it’s innate, we still have to be taught, especially if we experience loss at a young age. At 30 years old, I finally started learning.

I grieved the things I lost when I was a child. I grieved experiences that should have never happened and those that should have but didn’t. I grieved misaligned relationships, people who died, and finally, the unexpected death of my marriage.

Learning to grieve isn’t a defined process. Sure, there are steps and ways grief is expressed, but almost three years later, I am still unearthing what it means.

Now, it makes sense why no antidepressant or mood stabilizer ever “worked” on me and generally, only made my symptoms worse. I didn’t have a chemical imbalance. My heart was blocked up by years and years of unprocessed grief and that can have a very real and very traumatic effect on our physical and emotional health.

In January 2012, after a long year of intentionally surrendering my grief, I wrote this:

Does grief still exist? Yes. Regret? Yes. Sadness? Yes. Confusion? Yes. Fear? Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

Hope walks around these broken places in my heart and gently touches each one, reminding me of their purpose.

There is hope for all of us. It may be far, far away from you right now. Please take comfort in knowing it is there. And when the time is right and it drowns you in every rich drop, your life will completely change. From someone who has been to the valley of death and has returned with an abundance of undeserved life, there is hope.

May we journey together in these things so those who are weighed down with whatever their burdens are can find strength with God and through community, and those who are strong can help carry the wounded.

With everything that’s gone on in the last few years, I’m getting the chance to revise and repackage Permission to Speak Freely and release it under my new name , Anne Marie Miller. From what I’ve heard from my publisher, there are only a couple hundred of the current version left in Thomas Nelson’s warehouse.

Since I don’t think I’ve ever done a giveaway on this website, I thought I’d go a little old school and give away a few of those books. There are no more like them being produced (instead, Nelson has slightly changed the format, cover, and interior of the ones that will hold retail over until the revised version comes out).

If you haven’t purchased a copy of the book yet, you can try and win one here!

HOW?

Just leave a comment telling me one thing you feel like you can’t say in the church (and you can leave it anonymously as long as you give me a good email address in case you win).

Next Tuesday, May 14 at 10 am CST I will use Random.org to generate five random numbers based on how many comments are written. Those five numbers will each win a signed copy of Permission to Speak Freely AND a random book from my personal library. It could be a coloring book or some awesome new best seller…you just won’t know until you get it.

Go ahead and enter — leave a comment (or two or three) and tell your friends who you think might like the book! I’ll email the winners on May 14! Good luck!

Back in the fall, I had the opportunity to speak at The Youth Cartel’s Summit on the process of creativity. I laughed. A lot. Because my process looks a lot more like…it looks nothing like a process at all (so much that I’ve struggled for five minutes to find any kind of analogy).

After explaining my lack-of-process, they didn’t budge, so instead, I changed my talk. Kind of. Yes, there is a creative process behind every project we do but it varies from person to person. In my research, I discovered the “Blank Page” we often fear really isn’t blank. And I also managed to give a history lesson on Easter Island…all within about 15 minutes.

The Youth Cartel made this talk available last week, so I thought I’d share it with you! If you have 15 minutes and are a part of creating anything, I hope it can give you some insight on why the process you go through before you enter the creative process is more important than the creative process itself. I hope you enjoy it!

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace.

Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack’s wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices…

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner…

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship…

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it, a man will gladly go and sell all that he has…it is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift that must be asked for, the door at which one must knock.

These are words that could have been written today. But they weren’t. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote them in the 1930′s – when he was in his late twenties. This is a timeless truth that we should contemplate maybe more now in our commercialized, diagrammed culture.

*What does grace mean to you?

*How do you see the message of grace presented in our world today?

When I was seventeen years old, I moved into my very first apartment. Instead of worrying about who would ask me to prom, I was worried about having to fire the seminary student at the local bookstore I managed. I couldn’t vote, but I could create a profit-and-loss report with my eyes closed.

I didn’t go into my late teenage years expecting to be a career woman, but those were the cards I was dealt. I quickly moved into corporate marketing and communication, then ministry, and signed my first major book contract when I was twenty-seven and a contract for my second and third books when I was twenty-eight. By the time I was thirty-two years old, I had the opportunity to travel to eighteen countries to write stories, I was honored to speak in front of over a hundred thousand people, and for the most part, was able to live the dream staying self-employed. This often meant I could work in my pajamas and avoid using mascara for days on end.

This was life – a good life. One I have held in deep gratitude in my prayers as I know it is a life many work hard for (myself included…not once has it been an easy life).

As I continue writing, I find myself in a tension I’ve not yet experienced and questions I’ve not yet asked: Is this what I’m here to do? I examine the colors in the garden of my heart. Are the seasons changing?

Writing has always been a part of who I am. From the time I could form the shapes of the alphabet, words move from my mind to paper. This art will never leave me.

But as a career? I wonder…

Merton wrestled with writing as vocation, and for the last two years I have poured over his journals. I see myself in his words and feel his tension. As always, whatever I put my hands to can succeed, but if the motivation of my heart is misaligned, it’s worthless in the eyes of my God.

Intertwining the art of writing with the nuances of vocation often leaves me feeling like I need to exfoliate the surface of my heart and mind. My social media feeds tell me what to do to get more people to read me (I have accepted this as using any of these virtual places as simply mediums to communicate the truths God has imparted to me), as well as demanding – yes, demanding – I share everyone else’s work with those around me. “Retweet this!” — “Can you put this on your Facebook Page, blog, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, refrigerator door, and all the telephone posts in a 2-mile radius from your house?” — “Hey, look! I’m #471,271 on Amazon!”

The Scriptures say to celebrate with those who celebrate and mourn with those who mourn. Usually, my heart gets tired from mourning but I’ve found lately my heart is tired from celebrating; not because I envy others’ success (much), but because the noise can be so, so, loud.

I do not want to add to this noise, yet there is even irony as I type these words on my blog, which I will then place a link to it on Twitter and Facebook.

“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”  - Merton

 

I never thought there was much difference between reconciliation and forgiveness. In my heart, it all kind of meant the same thing – letting go of pain that someone had inflicted on me. Usually this involved some type of “making up” process involving apologies, sometimes tears, and a hug to make everything alright.

Twelve years ago, somebody hurt me in a very painful, inexcusable way. For years, I didn’t allow myself to work through the pain as I needed to. A couple of years ago, circumstances (which were mostly out of my control) caused me to stare at this wound square in the face.

As strange as it sounds, I’ve never doubted that I forgave this person. I feel fortunate that, for the most part, forgiveness comes easy to me. There are probably only two situations in my life where I know I still need to work on forgiving someone, but this particular hurt isn’t one of them.

However, as I was processing through healing during this time, I began questioning if i really had forgiven this person. Sure, the scabs had been peeled off and the wounds were fresh – and it hurt…badly, all over again.

Someone who was helping me through this sent me an email. He encouraged me and said that what I was experiencing wasn’t me being bitter or holding on (which was what I was afraid I was doing) but that I was desiring reconciliation.

I wanted for this person to own up to the mistake and for everything – painful as it would be – to be okay again.

And I wanted for the relationship to be harmonized and restored completely.

Later, I read this in a book:

Joseph was reconciled with his brothers when they came to Egypt in search of grain. By the time his brothers reached Egypt, he was able to stand before them and confront them because he had no inner feelings that would keep him from having a relationship of unity and peace with them.

Forgiveness is unilateral. You can forgive even if [someone] never admits [their wrong doing], is never sorry, and never changes. But reconciliation requires both people’s commitment to recovery, honesty, repentance, forgiveness, and communication. Even then, reconciliation is a long and difficult process of breaking down barriers and building trust.

You may not ever be reconciled with a person that hurt you (or that you hurt).

That part takes both people to work through.

Forgiveness is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for reconciliation.

However, forgiveness is a decision that you make, and continue to make, regardless of the other person’s choice.

And through the cross and grace and love, you can.