Beauty from Ashes: A Journey of Faith

By Carol Beck

faith [feyth]
noun

Faith is the evidence of things unseen. It isn’t a feeling that can wash over and away quickly, like the burst of happiness at a beautiful sunset. It’s a choice, a journey, and one that can change and shape a person over years. The shape that faith makes of you depends on your resistance and your surrender, and sometimes both at the same time.

This is a journey of faith: the good and bad and messy. It’s full of questions, sometimes answers, sometimes horrible missteps. Expect silliness, stories, thoughts, musings, heartaches, and wonder within these pages. There is beauty even in ashes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Feb 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781982221652

Carol Beck

Carol Beck is a dreamer, unicorn lover, yoga teacher, and author living in the Washington, D.C. area. Her first book, BELIEVE: Releasing Limiting Beliefs to Find Your Authentic Self was released in 2018. Through sharing her personal experiences through trauma and unbelief with readers, Carol offered tips, tricks, and tools to let go of limitations and become who you were meant to be. With her second book, Beauty From Ashes: A Journey of Faith, Carol shares her journey with faith––addressing the disappointment, vulnerability, miracles, and joys that can come through believing in something bigger than oneself. Carol is a 500-hour trained Ayurveda Yoga Teacher and studied at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. She also studied aromatherapy at the New York Institute of Aromatic Studies. Carol holds multiple advanced degrees, including a Bachelor of Arts in Public Relations and Political Science from Syracuse University, a Master of Science in Justice, Law & Society from American University, and a diploma for graduates in International Relations from the University of London. You can find more about Carol at her website: www.joyyoga108.com.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Heritage

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Me and Granddaddy (Terry Stephens), 1984

Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness

and who seek the LORD:

Look to the rock from which you were cut

and to the quarry from which you were hewn

Isaiah 51:1

When I was five years old, I got my first cassette tape ever. It was Amy Grant’s debut album and to me it was heaven. Do you guys remember cassette tapes? Not as vintage-cool as records, not as shiny-new as CDs––you had to rewind them, and sometimes the tape in the spools would get caught on stuff and need to be manually reset, or would end up left in the car to melt in the sun. But in 1986, they were new to me, and magic, and I had my very first one. I remember that I couldn’t wait to start listening, so I pressed play, climbed into bed, and heard eighteen-year-old Amy singing along to the prettiest piano sounds as if they were playing me instead of the keys. I wanted to be just like her.

That was how my faith journey started. Not with Amy Grant, although she was kind of my singing hero, but with a heritage I was born into. After my Amy Grant cassette came other Christian music genre gems, like Michael W. Smith and Stephen Curtis Chapman. The first time I heard non-Christian music was at my babysitter’s house when I was seven years old. All the kids in the babysitting co-op group would get to take turns playing a favorite song for friends. Everyone played singles by Madonna and the Bangles, which were brand new to me, and startling in their otherness. I would always get picked last and when I played my favorite Kim Boyce jams (you’re probably thinking: who?!), everyone would leave, and I would end up listening with one or two stragglers who were just being nice. I mean, I get it. I was dancing to songs like Satan Bite the Dust, and that’s not terribly appealing to tiny people who were otherwise Walking Like Egyptians.

Growing up in and around a church imprints something on you. More than culture or ritual, there’s a presumption that there’s a God. It’s just a given, like oxygen or gravity.

My family went to church every Sunday, dressed in our very best outfits. My mom would French braid my hair in two blonde rows of art, matching my sister, Steph, with her equally braided hair and smaller version of my dress. I wish I could say I got something out of those Sundays on a deep spiritual level, but it was really more of a culture––a ritual and a family tradition. We dressed up, and we went to church. We sang songs from worn Baptist hymnals. Then my sister and I went to Sunday school to play with our friends and color pictures of Jesus who was undoubtedly holding a lamb and/or a small child. We would go out to lunch, eat way too much, come home and change into comfy expanding clothes to cover how full our bellies were with Sunday tacos or Luby’s cafeteria catfish special.

The thing about church heritage is it doesn’t really require faith. There’s faith inherent in the structure – faith that came before – but not necessarily faith for those who follow.

My ancestors, my mom tells me, came from England. They sailed to Mexico and settled there as silver miners. Two of them were missionaries and shared their faith loudly with those they met. They were told to stop preaching, and when they didn’t, they were found with pages of the Bible stuffed in their slit throats. The Mexican government confiscated and nationalized their silver mines, and so those who were left gathered their families in covered wagons and moved to Texas.

That? That’s a lot of faith. To be killed for what you believe, and to believe it so strongly you’re willing to be killed for it. But somewhere, somehow, through the years and generations that follow, that faith and conviction are turned into ritual and tradition. In the southern United States in particular, religion is cultural. It’s something you’re born into. While many denominations place a great emphasis on choosing that heritage through confirmations or baptisms, the reality for most people is it’s tradition. It’s just what you do. Coming to real faith out of heritage tends to take a big life earthquake––and sometimes many of them.

So here, in the beginning of this book on faith and mistakes and conversations with God, I share my journey of heritage – the culture I grew up in and around – as the stepping point to all of the rest of what I know about––well, everything really.

My granddaddy was a music minister in a Southern Baptist church in Texas, and the kindest most wonderful soul I’ve ever known. He would buy me chicken nuggets and a strawberry soda from Church’s Chicken, push me in the swing in his backyard for hours, and teach me how to make coffee so we could play office––which was really just him trying to work, and me drinking coffee and asking him questions while he was trying to work.

I remember him typing away at his typewriter so precisely and carefully so he didn’t have to waste any paper with rewrites. Sometimes he would slowly go over the letters to cover mistakes, writing over the new fresh chemically-whitened smell with a black pen so it looked like typewriter ink.

He had stacks and stacks of sheet music in his office and in the office annex in the garage. It smelled a little musty and a little magical all at the same time. From there, he would make music – taking hours of every week to take voices and turn them into praise. Every Sunday after he poured his heart and soul into arrangements, directing, and singing, he’d still spend hours after the service talking to anyone who wanted a friendly ear. I would lie in the church pews waiting for him to return his attention my way, because when Granddaddy was around, the sun shone.

In my childlike mind, God was like my granddaddy––kind, patient, thoughtful, with a radiant smile. Maybe minus the chewing wads of paper like gum part, but otherwise totally the same. I was lucky to have a physical earthly example like that, because when people talked about God as a father, I knew just what that meant.

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Me and Granddaddy (Terry Stephens), 1985

When I went to visit my grandparents, Granddaddy would sleep on the couch while I got to sleep in Grandma’s bed. We would read a little from the Bible every night, and then play a clever game that Grandma made up called whoever goes to sleep first gets candy. We generally played for Skittles, and I always won. I never really understood that this game was rigged until I was much older. For a kid, it was an amazing prize to get Skittles––so much so that I was willing to forego my 42,086 questions about life, or my temptation to skirt all the usual bedtime rules so that I could win the rainbow-colored candy.

Grandma would always have packs of Certs in her pursue – those terrible/amazing breath mints that may still exist somewhere in the world. On the way to church, I would fish them out and get minty fresh, tablet by tablet, in the car and eventually in the pew. Sometimes we’d upgrade from Certs to Werther’s Original hard candies, and I’d have