At Home in this Life: Finding Peace at the Crossroads of Unraveled Dreams and Beautiful Surprises

By Jerusalem Jackson Greer and Shauna Niequist

In the midst of beauty and mess, chaos and monotony, celebrations and mourning, Jerusalem Greer tells her story of finding redemption in what is rather than what could be, by practicing the presence of God through rediscovering ancient contemplative teachings and practices (solitude, study, work, prayer, and service) and pairing them with domestic arts (baking, gardening, sewing).

Jerusalem writes with a raw honesty that reassures readers they are not alone in feeling not good enough, not wise enough, not Christian enough to figure out God's plans.

At Home in this Life is the story of how everything I thought would make me happy came undone, and then how I found a way to make myself at home in this beautiful, messy, amazingly tender, completely unbalanced life, by imperfectly practicing one spiritual discipline at a time—smack in the middle of raising kids, mending the sweaters and burning the bread." — Jerusalem Jackson Greer

In addition to being a writer, Jerusalem is also a crafter, former pastor and blogger. She lives with her husband and two sons in Greenbrier Arkansas. As a family they are attempting to lives a slower version of the modern life. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Jerusalem is active on Facebook and Pinterest and regularly posts on her blog "Slow Living in a Fast World" where she records what she calls her "beautymess" attempts at living a sacramental life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781612619811

Jerusalem Jackson Greer

Jerusalem Jackson Greer lives in an old house with her husband, their two boys, and a host of friendly critters. She is the Lay Minister of Children, Youth, and Families for St, Peter’s Episcopal Church in Conway, Arkansas. You can find her blogging, most days, at www.jerusalemgreer.com.

Book preview

Introduction

That faith and love operate best through the humble means of boring, everyday occupations is a thoroughly biblical perspective, for its stories repeatedly remind us that God’s attention is fixed on what we regard as unimportant and unworthy.

— Kathleen Norris

At this juncture in life, knowing what I know, and blissfully unaware of what I don’t know, I have come to the following conclusion: balance, when it comes to living a wholehearted life, is a myth. It is a beautiful myth sold to us by advertising agencies, planner companies (oh, I love the hunt for the magic planner!), and storage solution stores. And over time, this myth has morphed into an idol many of us chase. An idol we believe will make us whole, make our lives more sane and our days more calm. But while I adore the thought of living a nice, steady, evenly balanced life, I am convinced than the relentless pursuit of this ideal is at best like chasing after a fairytale, and at worst a dangerous distraction from being present to the life we have.

To be sure, some balance and harmony are promised in the depth and breadth of spiritual practices such as silence and solitude, prayer and reflection. That all sounds lovely, right? Except that as a busy, working, creative mother, stepping away from daily life for the sort of time prescribed by most monastic disciplines and practices has always been out of the question. While I see the value in long periods of silence, days upon days of retreats, and a closet just for praying, my kids, my job, and the mortgage company find them much less enchanting. And, honestly, I have trouble with the idea of fitting one more thing into my already busy schedule. I want spiritual practices that will help me live a slower version of my modern life—practicing the presence of God right where I am—not adding another impossible standard of perfection to the top of my already full to-do list. I bet you feel this way too.

We all live smack in the middle of beauty and mess, and much to our dismay there is no product or app that can prepare us for, or insulate us from, the mess. We know from experience, you and I, that when messy things enter our lives—the broken feet, the lost house sales, the chicken massacres, the sick children, the lost jobs—they do not wait for an invitation. They do not wait until the laundry is done, until the checkbook is balanced, or until the kitchen floor is clean. They come and wedge themselves right in between the never-ending demands of daily life—the drama of the carpool line, the stack of bills already too high, and the career we have but don’t always love. They come in the midst of births and deaths, celebrations and seasons of depression. They arrive when things are good and when things are worse. They come with balloons and with shut-off notices.

So how then do we live? What are we to do?

The somewhat dismaying (or perhaps comforting?) truth is that Scripture is full of examples of people living this same way—right at the crossroads of unraveled dreams and beautiful surprises. Lives full of disaster and delight, celebration and mourning, sickness and healing, ordinary and extraordinary moments, all crashing into each other despite the best-laid plans. Nowhere is there an emphasis on living a balanced life. Instead, the lessons I glean from the stories of David, Ruth, Timothy, Esther, Noah, and from the lives of the saints who have gone before us—Francis, Benedict, Theresa, Lottie Moon—are not ones of how to create a foolproof plan for a balanced life. Instead I find example after example of a life thrown into chaos, trampled and muddied by unpredictable circumstances, strong emotions, and challenging relationships, punctuated with beauty and healing.

It is in one of these seasons for me—a season filled with striving for balance while ignoring the gaping holes in my heart—that my dreams dramatically unraveled. In this season, the Holy Spirit began (again!) to help me release my selfish and controlling agenda for my life, and replace it with a new agenda, a new life, a wholehearted life, rooted in love, service, stewardship, and transformation—a way of being in the world that would require me to stretch and grow and stay and learn.

What follows in these chapters is the story of how everything I thought would make me happy came undone, and then how I found a way to make myself at home in this beautiful, messy, amazingly tender, completely unbalanced life, by imperfectly practicing one spiritual discipline at a time—smack in the middle of raising the kids, mending the sweaters, and burning the bread.

Jerusalem Jackson Greer

PART 1

GOING

chapter 1

Mess

If we pay attention to our tears, they’ll show us something about ourselves.

—Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine

There is a certain freedom in being unstable. In always being on the move, chasing dreams, laying out new plans. After all, who doesn’t love a search for the greener grass, the pot of gold, the lucky strike? We know it must be out there, we have seen signs of it on Instagram and Pinterest. In our search for The Next Thing, some of us shed places and people like last year’s winter coat. We blow up our lives time and time again, leaving a cloud of dust that no one can see through long enough to catch us, always watching for the moment when we can jump on the next train to Something New or Somewhere Different. And then there is the more socially acceptable approach of escape practiced by the tribe I belong to. We have a different, slower way of leaving. Sometimes we even try to implicate God in our plans to change, move, leave, abandon, quit, and run. We are just being who we were created to be, we say. We are just following God’s call on our lives, we explain. God has closed this door, but I am sure there is a window open somewhere, we rationalize as we scoot out the back door, our excuses spilling out of our hastily packed suitcases. We are the ones who are always waiting for our lives to start, the ones who work overtime creating a smoke screen of contentment, so no one will suspect that we are actually biding our time, waiting for the all-elusive Someday When to show up and save us.

You have heard about Someday When, right?

Someday When we move we will all get along better.

Someday When I change jobs I won’t be so tired or cranky at home.

Someday When I lose weight I will take my kids to the pool.

Someday When we have enough money I won’t be so controlling.

Someday When I find the right church I will be happier.

Someday When we have kids I will be fulfilled.

Once upon a time, not so many years ago, I was living a life that I didn’t want. I was living in a house I didn’t want, in a town I didn’t want to live in, working at a job I didn’t want to have. I was burned out, exhausted, and weary, and every edge of my being was frayed beyond recognition. If my life had been a Lifetime movie it would have been called Biting Off More Than She Can Chew. And all around me was the proof—my house was a disaster, and I was constantly sick with colds and fevers from my overcommitting ways.

It was during this season that my friend Shauna tweeted the following: Exhaustion is not a badge of honor I want to wear anymore. I read that comment, cheered for her, re-tweeted it (and watched as it was then re-tweeted more than anything I have ever quoted before or since), then promptly succumbed to an exhaustion-induced cold that landed me in bed for a week. Lying in bed, staring at the dust on my ceiling fan, chastising myself for its presence, too worn out and sickly to do anything about it, I was comforted to know I was not alone in my exhaustion or my conviction that all this busyness was (a) getting me nowhere and (b) highly overrated as a sign of wonder-womanliness.

Of course once I had recovered from the flat-on-my-back cold, it wasn’t long before I was up to my old habits again. Doing too much, expecting too much, pushing too hard, and hating my life (and ultimately myself) for it. Overwhelmed by the mess of my life, I came up with a plan—a plan to change everything, a plan to fix everything that was broken. The plan was this: I would run as fast as I could into a different life. And that different life would be the life of a farm gal. A life that would be slower, gentler, less frenetic. A life of walks in the orchard, fishing in the pond, and picnics in the fields.

My awareness that I wanted to live in the country can be traced directly to a woman named Phyllis Tickle. I discovered Phyllis in Barnes & Noble on an autumn Tuesday morning. I remember that it was a Tuesday because I always went to B&N after yoga, which was always on Tuesdays. So there I was, at the big box bookstore, taking my sweet time combing through the sale section, doing my best to avoid going home to piles of dirty dishes and even dirtier laundry when I bumped into Phyllis on the Last Chance bargain cart. To this day I am not sure why I bought Phyllis’s memoir, The Shaping of a Life. I cannot remember what it was that called to me from the dust jacket synopsis, but this one little four-dollar discovery would completely and utterly change the trajectory of my life. And that is not hyperbole. I can say with all confidence that you would not be reading my words right now if I had not procrastinated about my laundry that day.

I was as hooked on Phyllis as I had been on Anne Shirley of Green Gables at the age of twelve, even though I was as far removed at thirty-two from this Tennessee doctor’s wife and academic mother of seven as I had been from a Canadian orphan living on Prince Edward Island then. Yet in both instances there had been a recognition, a reflection of self that was undeniable. Somewhere in the middle of Phyllis’s words I found a part of myself that had until that moment been lying dormant, and the awakening was so acute that I have never recovered from it.

Aware of my newfound love, my sweet husband tracked down all three volumes of her Farm in Lucy series (books that weren’t easy to come by in our little town in the pre-Amazon Prime era) for Christmas gifts that year. This small series follows the rhythm of the liturgical year through stories of the Tickles’ family life on a small farm in Lucy, Tennessee, stories that are filled with equal doses of charm and wisdom.

As I sat in bed that cold December, reading Phyllis’s What the Land Already Knows, tears began to stream down my face. And I was only on the prologue. But it was the prologue that would change everything.

Phyllis and her husband Sam’s decision to move their family out of the city and into the country came about because they had come to the conclusion that their seven children did not know how to grow and tend, make and make do, or understand the true cost of living. Phyllis wrote that her kids also possessed none of the freedom or discipline that come from knowing how to live on the land. Ultimately, it is always the land and what it knows that sustain life; and it was to the land that we had to take them before it was too late. This passage appears in the prologue for each Farm in Lucy volume, and every time I would read it I would cry, a river of tears streaming down my face uncontrollably. And I had no idea why.

In a recent conversation with a friend about how she knew it was time to pursue her calling to become an Episcopal priest, she said the fact that she cried at every ordination service she attended was a bit of a tip-off that her time had come to follow suit. I have never cried in an ordination service (though I have sat and waited to see if I would), but each and every time I would read Phyllis’s prologue (and I read these books seasonally), the waterworks were turned on and my heart felt as if it would come out of my body with longing. The only explanation of those tears that ever made sense is this: those books, and in particular that passage, awoke a desire in me that I never even knew I had. A light switch had been flipped in a previously undiscovered room of my heart. This longing for a life I didn’t understand, for which I had no context and almost no vocabulary, was now pulsing through my heart. A conversion had begun. And to complicate matters, my husband, Nathan, was also experiencing a conversion of the same sort, in his own way. We were being called to the land, and it was to the land that we knew we had to take our family (though we couldn’t yet articulate why) before it was too late. It would only take us a decade to get there.

When we first felt the call to a more rural sort of life, we had just bought the house we thought would be our forever home, a lovely 1940s fixer-upper cottage in a historic neighborhood that I had long dreamed of living in. We had two small children, a ton of debt, and no idea who or what we wanted to be when we grew up. And even though our hearts were being pulled to a different way of life, a way of life we couldn’t even name yet, we knew we were not going anywhere anytime soon. The truth was we had boxed ourselves in, and it was going to take some time to find a way out. There were a lot of other dreams that had to be pursued and mistakes that had to be made first. Besides, what did we know of this longing, this itch, this calling, other than what my tears told me, what Nathan’s longing to work the land told him? Those were the years before hobby farming, smallholding sustainability, and hipster homesteading were common. No one in our circle was attempting this sort of life; there was no one we could look to for guidance or wisdom about how one goes from a city life to a country life with very little experience and even less capital.

And so we shoved this longing to the back of our hearts, in the drawer where we stuff all the things we call Crazy Ideas, and went about raising our kids, going to work, pursuing other dreams, and working on the house. Over the next few years our life was full of outward signs of forward motion. We survived toddlerhood. I started a business, lost a business, and got a job. Nathan was promoted, the kids started school, and we changed churches a few times. I received my first book contract, our house was featured in a national magazine, and Nathan’s band won a local contest. I was able to co-pastor a church, and the boys got into a great new school. We checked off box after box on our bucket list, but neither of us ever felt completely settled. We did the sorts of things that you do when trying to numb the aching hole in your heart: we ate too much, drank too much, slept too much, worked too much, ignored too much. We ran up more debt, we played a lovely round or two of My Unhappiness Is Your Fault, and we spent a lot of time in our therapist’s office—together and apart. An annoying cloud of angst and dissatisfaction seemed to trail behind us like a piece of toilet paper on the bottom of a shoe.

A compounding issue in those years was Nathan’s progressive unhappiness and the ways he chose to cope with the increasingly dark cloud over him. It was akin in some ways to acedia, that spiritual and mental apathy that can come from a life of deep repetition and little meaning. We now understand that the darkness was a combination (in his words) of a really bad attitude and an even worse diagnosis. But in the deep, thick middle of it, before the medical stuff was sorted out (severe sleep apnea, adult onset of attention deficit disorder), and before Nathan had his own come-to-Jesus, palm-to-forehead, attitude-adjusting moment, his unhappiness was the fifth and often neediest member of our family, a member whose mood—distant or short-tempered—could change the tone of any given day. I felt it was my job to manage this presence; I worked overtime to push it back from consuming our home life.

I’m a solutions person. I like to think that there is always a solution. My personality is wired so that I am on a constant search to make life better—for myself, my family, my friends. I love to improve any situation and I am a tad obsessed with the idea of personal growth. Of course there are many benefits and pitfalls to being this sort of person. The benefits include being good at handling chaos and being a quick problem solver; but a major pitfall is that I put a lot of stock in Movement versus Waiting. All too often, I would rather slap a Band-Aid on a problem than allow the space, time, and discomfort that true healing needs, especially if this in any way outwardly resembles Doing Nothing, as I have very little patience for the appearance of stagnation.

During those